Usability downsides if I get rid of the top menu

Picture – [url]http://d.pr/U35A[/url]



Lately I have being thinking that the top menu and the top quick links replicates functionality. What are your thoughts?



Picture is my current proposed setup. Is it too compressed. Is it too hard to find clicks?





kogi

I like your design. It looks neat.



In this case I don’t see the need of having two link bars. They could only be used to add one more level of hierarchy to your navigation.



It would be useful if you had a more complex structure, like for example, lots of content sections (blogs/forums/static pages/legal info…) or very distinct categories (computers and kitchenware)



I decided to keep both on my site, but I recall that I wondered if it would be really needed at some point. What I did then is that I replicate the top links on the footer and made it really small. All I have there is: legal info, contact, and site map.