Nick, I agree with John Wells that it has to do with your target audience. I'm in e-Learning where many users are not particuarly web-savvy so I stick with the familiar conventions over trying to be out on the bleeding edge of innovation. There are times when my design-self screams at the tedium, so I have to channel the inventiveness into either interface innovations to make them work better or into my personal/private clients' sites.
For example, I try to stick with commonly used terms: Home or Main (I prefer Main, more professional in most contexts unless you want the user to feel some ownership of the site etc), Search, Help (rather than FAQ) etc. It is rather frustrating trying to find navigational style information (this is a project I am undertaking just now). There's some interesting stuff at http://www.webstyleguide.com/interface/navigate.html - but it's very generalized. No one seems to want to commit to anything, perhaps because the web is so fluid that you can't just say there is one way to do something. Overall, I think you need to look at your audience, decide what kind of other interfaces they are already familiar with (browser, Word, Photoshop etc) and figure out how good their web-savvy is. I think the link above makes one important point - we can rely too much on major navigational links. Put some context in your page so users know what you mean. Good luck, if I find out any more on my search I'll share it with you, Rosemary Norwood Blackwork Web Intelligence ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
