Re: Navigation bar CHALLENGE
I'd be breaking those links into sub-menus, even on the desktop site. Something along the lines of Cars, Aircraft, Year of Vehicle etc. The advertisers and sponsors could be detached altogether and grouped with any social media buttons, or contact buttons.
Re: Navigation bar CHALLENGE
I second Chris M’s suggestion.
It is generally recommended by “the experts” that you limit principal navigation to between five and nine choices. It’s not just that having 40 options makes the page look overwhelming (to put it kindly), but that it will almost certainly discourage users from spending time on the page. They’ll give up looking and move on to someone else’s site.
It would be wise to use submenus or even to make subcategories available not directly through the main page, but through pages that are reached from it.
Good luck.
Re: Navigation bar CHALLENGE
You need to change the feel from being static, especially with cars and planes as the theme.
Create a grid of photos, using Hover 1 Link, and add text and icons to the pop-up on the MouseOver layer. You could have great fun with the icons, especially given the graphics capabilities that come with Xara Desktop applications.
I, too, would regroup the buttons into collections.
You need a theme so either put more detail into the page pop-up layers or split up the material over a number of pages.
Acorn
Re: Navigation bar CHALLENGE
My first impression from looking at your screen captures is OMG TMI
I think your biggest challenge is to organize this information in a straightforward and logical way so the visitor is not totally overwhelmed with choices.