With the advent of Drupal 5.x administrative features moved to the '/admin' URL (with clean URLs on of course), which is really nice because you can see, at a glance, pretty much all of the things you can do to administer your site.

However, until you become super familiar with how drupal's admin is laid out (Site Configuration vs. Site Building etc...), it can still be quite time consuming to look through the admin page... in comes a couple of 3rd party modules that can not only save you time but also make site administration more intuitive and fun!

First up - the Drupal Administration Menu (aptly titled eh?!); its a great little module that throws a drop-down menu atop your site that's powered by the navigation menu itself; which means you don't need to move any menu items into a new menu or anything.  Oh, and it works with most themes pretty seamlessly; the module's menu is completely CSS - so no javascript code to mess with other scripts!

Secondly - Instead of creating a new place on your site to administrate the site, why not make the standard Navigation menu admin options easier to use?  I suggest installing the DHMTL menu module; which automatically makes duplicates of your menu blocks which use a simple javascripted/dhtml approach to facilitating collapsible menus! That's right folks; now you don't have soooo many page loads when working through hierarchical menus. :)

Personally, I like using dhtml menus because it gives site administrators the same UI that all site users have.