Sharepoint 2010: List vs. Subsite for multi-level navigation

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I'm setting up a public-facing website with 4 levels of navigation. There is a fixed top level navigation that breaks things into section. The second level of navigation is a horizontal menu. The 3rd and 4th levels are displayed in a tree menu.

Should this be set up in lists, or in subsites? I understand that you can nest folders inside other lists, so I'm not sure how you'd go about handling this navigation.

When should you use a subsite instead of a list?

The look/feel of all top level sections is the same.

I'm new to this Sharepoint stuff, so I'd like to know some best practices. Thanks!

Edit: Site Structure

There is a fixed horizontal top-level navigation. Each of these links points to a landing page for that section.

Each top-level section has it's own sub navigation. This is a horizontal single level navigation.

Pages within that 2nd level could have sub-pages displayed in a two-level tree style. The 3rd level would be clickable with it's own landing page, so it's not just a 'folder' or container. So, that makes four levels of navigation.

Vent

This kind of information architecture should be very straightforward to set up in any content management product, but SharePoint is just not intuitive to me at all. I find that documentation on creating public facing custom designed sites to be extremely lacking.

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sharepoint
You can't really nest a list within another list - you can create folders and group by metadata, but no lists within lists. Typically I use Lists/Libraries at the lowest level of my taxonomies. – Shaneo
So subsites is the only real way to accomplish multi-level navigation? (with lists being the last level) – ScottE
I think this problem is a good illustration of why SharePoint shouldn't be considered as a general purpose web content management system. Ultimately it has a small set of containers, whose behaviour and degree of nestability are fairly fixed, and can't necessarily be fitted to any arbitrary information architecture. – e100

2 Answers

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That depends - A list and a site hold very different content. Your navigation shouldn't dictate your content. It should be the other way around. A list describes related items, whereas a site is a container for many lists, document libraries, etc.

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Here is a good solution for a custom navigation in Sharepoint 2010 utilizing their built in aspmenu.

http://sharepoint2010customnavigation.blogspot.com/