Sorry, I did see this question but you were talking about changing the nav to a dropdown and I missed the part about it being on the home page.
So with regards to the drop down, that's really a theme issue. I think the nav is fine how it is now, if you want to change it you can modify the theme to your liking. (May even be possible to do just a CSS change?)
But yes, it would make sense to have the sub-menu on the home page. The discussion then is what do we show in the sub-menu? Currently there is some inconsistency in the menus:
- All Activity, Q&A (home page), Questions, and Hot are all available as top-level menu items. Only Questions is shown by default.
- Under Questions, we have Recent (default), Hot, Most votes, Most answers, and Most views.
If the home page is to show the sub-menu, we need to have a home page link so it can show as selected/highlighted (e.g. "Q&A" or "Recent answers"). Then we have the issue of what to do on the All Activity and Hot pages - show a sub-menu or not?
I'm not sure any site gets this right, even Stack Overflow - they have different tabs on each page:
- Home page - interesting (or active on other SE sites), featured, hot, week month.
- Questions - newest, featured, frequent, votes, active, unanswered (plus a separate Unanswered top-level item).
Let me know your thoughts!