How will visitors find information at your web site?
First you need to organize and/or categorize the information you want to present; then you have to give your visitor a method to find the information. Your site menu should be designed to allow your customers and potential customers to find all the information you want them to have in a logical manner. Make it easy for them to find the information with your choice of menu(s).
Typical menus are found on the left margin or top of a web page. The menu you elect to use may be a combination of styles. Perhaps you want the top of every page to have links to your home page, contact page and product page(s) and a side menu for links to other pages. Remember, it is not necessary to include links to every page in your site from your menus on all your pages. You may, for example, provide links to detailed information on products or services only from the pages listing those products or services.
You menus can be text only, graphics, or combination of both. You will frequently see text only navigation/menus on the bottom of most pages. These are frequently used on large pages to provide a visitor with a simple method to navigate to another page in your site without having to scroll back to the top of a page.
Menus can be static, drop-down, fly-out, just plain text or any combination thereof. Surf around several web sites and take note of the differences.