World wide? Seven top (continents)
Euro, 37 breaks
US, 50, and a few territories
Asia... etc.
Local? Top spots.

The question is the 500-1000 pages... is each page a location/hotel, etc? The break down by city.

A better way is to think your audience: What are they looking for? Where do they want to go?

Heck, break it down into "bed and breakfast" and "penthouse suites" here there and everywhere.

Okay, above stands... but on second thought (as we all do from time to time), what is your question re: CSS ... a menu structure? If so, do you have your best attempt at same which you can share (remember, site names need to be example.com).

What is your desire? Drop down, colors, sliders, tabs, etc. Need to see it as code... we aren't going to give it to you. :)

Tangor, thanks for the replies.

1.Each page with be a location.
2.I can code anything so don't need help with execution, I am just asking about best practice, efficiency, etc, since I have never done a menu this large. Options are data driven and building the menu on the fly OR building the menu in html/css, then porting that to a .js and including it in each page. AND/OR maybe also doing an AJAX incremental search box

I really don't care about the coding, just need some ideas to bounce off re efficiency.

My instinct is that you should avoid creating a mega-menu that links to everything from every page. Go for a balance between:

Level1-Level2-Level3...LevelX
- or, for example -
Continent - Country - Region - City - Neighborhood...

and dynamically limiting the menu depth to 2-3 levels deeper than the user's current level. That is, if the user was on a "Continent" page you'd show the options down to the "Region" level, and if he was on a "Country" page you'd show options down to the "City" level. My thinking is that you don't want to make the user wade through 3-4 intermediate pages just to get to a particular destination, but you also don't want a menu system that contains 1000 links on every page. You can always use direct links to the most important destinations on the intermediate pages along the way or in a sidebar.

@rainborick: Thanks for replying. That does sound good, with some breadcrumb nav like:

World -> North America --> U.S. --> Florida

or some such, which would allow users to jump back

Using Dreamweaver, I have created an index page on which are items 1-9 representing 9 Categories. Each item links to a page on which the 9 categories are shown, each containing 4-6 subcategories, giving a total of 50 subcategories.

Each of those subcategories will contain 4-8 articles; using 7 as an average, if I place each article on a separate page--my preference--that would amount to about 350 pages.

A person more skilled than I in Dreamweaver insists this is doable but a very bad idea because it would require too much coding. Her advice is to have only subcategory (50) pages, with each set of 4-8 articles on its subcategory page, accessed by title links listed at the top of the page.

Is it inherently inelegant coding to use the separate page/separate article approach? Is the problem more serious than that? Suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks.