The need for these navigation strategies varies greatly between catalog size, type, industry. Linda did a post recently on Office Max’s navigation: http://www.getelastic.com/office-max-redesign/

Limiting categories and having a clean hierarchy of choices for your site visitor has proven to work well with the majority of our clients. Experiences have helped us form certain general guidelines. However, some of our clients have had great success with larger lists. So again, it depends on the types of clients, their products, and most importantly, the target market.

I hope that addresses your concern.

Could you please state your reasons or research method for making this statement? Were the long-list sites you tested well-designed or not so great, as in the example on the webinar? I suspect design had more to do with their failure rather than the number of links.
Miller’s magic number 7 research applies only to short term memory – not to the number of items a person can perceive.
Web businesses should be careful not to apply this as a “rule” and end up with vague category names that try to encompass too much, lose their users in an unnecessarily deep structure, or worse, losing the user at the start because they see no clear category to start looking for their product (no “scent of information” or trigger words).

Long lists of categories can be very user-friendly, often preferable, however they need to be displayed well – with white space, chunking, proper font size.
Good article on the background of this issue, and information on how to approach navigation breadth vs depth:
http://www.ddj.com/184412300

And from George Miller himself:
“the point was that 7 was a limit for the discrimination of unidimensional stimuli (pitches, loudness, brightness, etc.) and also a limit for immediate recall, neither of which has anything to do with a person’s capacity to comprehend printed text.”

Glad you liked the Webinar. Your prize is a free copy of the $95 landing page handbook. Sure, everyone else is eligible, but let’s pretend yours is for being our farthest away attendee – as far as we know

Really informative for someone just about to launch a web based business!

As someone tuning in from Northern Ireland – do I win a prize for person furthest away from you guys? lol

Love the site – have picked up some great info from it and have recommended it to lots of colleagues and friends

Kev

Some companies consider an add to cart as a conversion, whereas other companies may consider merely selecting the product from the main or category page as a conversion. Lead generations define conversion entirely differently. So from project to project the definition of conversion varies and a project may very well have a number of conversion goals.

In terms of what I was discussing regarding the 2 – 10% conversion rate, this reflected a final order or sale. Of course cart abandonment is certainly a very important topic but would require an entirely separate webinar!

Again, remember that each phase until that final sale requires some sort of conversion optimization. And every business will define the conversion goals they hope achieve with their platforms differently.

I hope that answers your questions. I’m very glad you enjoyed the webinar.

Thanks. Great webinar.