Mega Menu Navigation Best Practice

[shannmg1]

First off, I'm a landscape/nature/travel photographer. I mainly sell prints of my work. I'm in the process of redesigning my website, and I'm trying to decide whether to keep the navigation extremely simple or leave the drop-down menu for galleries. Currently, my navigation is something like this:

Galleries
 > Gallery for State or Country (example: California)
  > Sub-region in State or Country (example: San Francisco)
Blog
Prints
About
Contact

Selling prints is the top priority of the website, as that's what runs the business. I have lots of blog content, and I'm starting to build some good travel advice, etc. but in reality, the galleries, which then filter down to individual pages for each photo with a cart system, are the most important.

What I'm struggling to decide is whether to leave the sort of "mega menu" for the galleries, or to do away with them, and have the user go to the overall galleries page to navigate further into the site. Leaving the mega menu intact, the galleries page becomes a lot less important, and takes out a step to get to the shopping cart. However, I'm wondering if the amount of galleries in the drop down menu is giving TOO many choices up front as well.

I also wonder how changing this will affect search. Any thoughts on which is better or is it really just a matter of preference?

[TimHolmes]

First of all having looked at your site, may I say "Amazing photos", I partake in a few shots myself but mainly motorsport.

Having looked over the site your menu from first glance appears great to me both from a well structured source code point of view, but also from a usability perspective. I found it nice to be able to drill down into any particular section that I happened to be interested in and I think that's the main point. Let the users get as far as they can without having barriers in the way, having to go via multiple pages rather than using your already good/quick menu would make it a more problematic when moving around your site which could in turn increase exits.

You could maybe implement a search facility to enable your users to filter the images based on a variety of categories, e.g. landscape/colour/topic etc

[shannmg1]

Hey thanks for the answer! And thanks for the kind comments!

Maybe I should leave the navigation alone then. Some of my thought to go to a solid top bar was to remove any need for JavaScript, but I have always liked having the navigation sit in the corner so that the photos take center stage.

I've wanted to do a search for a while, but just haven't had the time to get to it. Maybe I'll put my efforts into that and cleaning up some of my code rather than a full redesign.

Thanks for the advice!