fishfinger - 8:53 am on May 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

Menus have various advantages to my mind.

You refer consistently to a page throughout the site. Randomising the anchor text is all very well for SEs but unless your CSS tells users which links they've clicked you'll frustrate / confuse them.

If you replace your menu with in-content links and you don't have enough of them throughout the site then you might have the opposite of the effect you intended - you'll make those pages seem less, not more important.

I find it rather frustrating to read something like...

We <b>talked before</b> about <b>this topic</b> - I'm grateful to <b>my friend Jim</b> for <b>pointing out</b> various interesting things.

(where the bold text would be links)

Personally I'd rather have a list of additional resources off to the right or underneath what I'm reading - not buried in it.

That said, I've been toying with the idea of putting menus in iframes, and using just the 'breadcrumb' navigation to distribute PR, then placing extra links within content or alongside/underneath it to the important pages.