Mega menus have been applauded by gurus such as Jacob Nielsen for their ease of use, so it's little surprise that they've become the menu of choice for a growing proportion of e-commerce retailers.

If you are planning on adding a mega menu to your site, want to improve your existing menu or just need some inspiration, here is a round-up of some of the things online retailers are currently doing with their horizontal navigation. At WSI Web Innovators Cyprus we will assist you to build an innovative and practical website as well as setting an effective SEO for it.




Argos uses a part-width mega menu to provide easy access to hundreds of different product categories.
Major categories are marked in bold to draw the eye to the appropriate area and it uses neatly spaced columns to help differentiate between sets of subcategory within.



Asos also goes for a part-width mega menu. It stands out from the page slightly thanks to a subtle drop shadow on the bottom and right hand side.
It doesn't break up the subcategories as much as others do, which makes the menu a bit more dense and harder to scan. However, it uses a dividing line to separate the subcategories within the main category "women" from the other links, so the running copy does feel as though it's all part of the same section.
There are also some links in the Shop By Collection part at the end which satisfy customers who prefer to shop in a different way.




Ebuyer's mega menu fits well with the theme of the site and is held together nicely by an orange border which extends from the tabbed navigation.
It includes prominent category names at the top of each column, making it easy to find what you're looking for. Each category has its own column, so categories with multiple subcategories are shorter than those with many.
This is clearer, but might present problems for information architecture because you're going to be forced to keep subcategories to a small number to prevent the mega menu from becoming too tall.



Lakeland's mega menu uses bold headings in a larger font to clearly define categories, with subcategories appearing beneath. Its menu is on the tall side, so it might pose an issue to customers browsing on netbooks which have a short display depth of only 600 pixels or so.
While it's really clear and very navigable on larger screens, I wonder whether Lakeland had difficulties in making all of their categories fit on the menu, because some of them, such as "Bins, recycling and composting", don't have any subcategories beneath, suggesting they couldn't fit them all on.
Making it fill the entire width of the screen might make it possible to fit in more of the subcategories for some of the categories for which there are currently none, and could solve the problem of its tall height.



The Dixons mega menu failed to load properly on my Mac, leaving me with a mess of layered menus that were hard to navigate.
It worked after a refresh to reveal a minimalist menu with clickable category headings and neatly ordered subcategories. It lacks column borders, which makes it a little harder to scan.




The main categories on the House of Fraser menu are clearly laid out and there are borders to help group related content. However, there are also some odd gaps for no apparent reason.