Did you know that you can lose up to 25% of your visitors with every click that you force them to make? It’s not that people hate to click. They hate to wait for new pages to load. Even with broadband, we’re getting more and more impatient. We hate waiting, even if it’s just for a split second. That’s why you need to design your site so that nothing ever requires more than 3 clicks to reach.
It used to be that you’d have to click on something, wait for the page to load, and then hit the back button to go back to the home page. That was very early on before webmasters realized that you could put navigation on all of the page. Duh.
Theses days, with drop down menus, you can easily get to most locations within a site by just clicking once, maybe twice. That’s dramatically increased the number pages that people are viewing within a site, and has increased the length that people are spending on a site. If you don’t have drop down navigation on your site yet, get it. It’s imperative.