New Tack with Navigation

I have been struggling with my image-based drop down navigation, as I have mentioned several times in this blog. Well, I am at the stage where I am re-reviewing the usability and I have decided to ditch the drop down menu all together. First, let me explain all my changes to the navigation:

1) Removed 'present travels': I reviewed the assignment brief and it says

Organise it as you consider appropriate but it should contain at least two sections:
i) up to the present (usually factually based)
ii) the present onwards (fiction, predictions or aspirations)

References had been given to past students who used 'past, present and future' but I was really trying to make that fit without good reason - I can only have been places, be one place and be going places despite spending 27 years of my life trying to work out how to be in more than one place at once!

2) Removed drop-down component all together. For a couple of reasons. First, moving "present" travels into "past" was going to start to create a very long drop-down. Additionally, while I may not have every place I have been to in the site in terms of content ready for submission with the assignment, I certainly plan to put this site live, and have it grow. I have been to 30 countries - listing each city would be a beast of a drop-down menu!

An article in the blog Smashing Magazine agrees - point 9. Paul Cormier over at Web Mastery Made Simple also agrees:

how often have you visited a site where you hover your mouse over the first menu element and sub-elements appear. Now you need to stop and think. Can I click the top-level element? Or is that just a place-holder to open the sub-menus?

The hover over was causing an issue, and further, I could not get the look and feel to the navigation I was seeking with CSS, and I set an objective not to introduce more complicated concepts to the webdesign.

Accordingly, the top level navigation is now all clickable and "past" travels and "future" travels each have their own landing page. On the past page - likely to be the largest at any time, I have used the spry collapsible panel functionality to enable cities to be categorised by each country. Presently each country only has one entry, but I will endeavour to change that prior to submitting the assignment so that it is clear why this functionality is relevant.