Cut the confusion, please

As I've said on this blog, and on radio, I am open to paying for online news, if what's on offer is appealing to me. However, most of the websites I currently visit have a long way to go before the deliver something I'd pay for. I definitely will not pay to see picture galleries of Jennifer Hawkins or Megan Fox. Apart from the actual content, I hope the people who are presumably creating the paid-for offering for the big publishers have a close look at the navigation systems of their sites. If I'm going to pay for content, I want to be able to find it quickly. Yesterday, I took my virtual protractor and slide rule to couriermail.com.au, which has one of the most confusing menu systems I've ever encountered. If my counting skills are functioning properly, the menu system offers up 13 main categories, with 12 extras underneath. With the dropdowns, there's a total of 79 options for the confused reader to try to work their way through in an attempt to find the content they want. Now that's just crazy. You'd be lucky to get 79 pages of news in the average daily paper, let alone 79 different categories. One of the things that's great about newspapers is that people know how to navigate their way around them: news up the front, features, opinion and business in the middle, and sport at the back. The website should be just as intuitive, and some streamlining is urgently needed.
PS: By way of comparision, the UK Digital Publisher of the Year winner, telegraph.co.uk has 14 main menu items plus changing "hot topics" links.