With our site, we have a top blue navigation bar.  This is build using categories from the taxonomy.  If you've used the taxonomy to build out your navigation links, you know that if you needed to link to an off site webpage you would have to add a Navigation Suppliment and tack it at the end if your links.

I'm working with Jadu 1.12 and purposing it into an intranet to replace our campus portal.

Creating widgets is probably the best feature of Jadu.  Depending on your programming expertise, you can create some pretty incredible functionality for your site.  A perfect example of this is this page on our site - http://www.messiah.edu/offices. This entire page is 1 widget I built that interfaces with the Jadu Directories.  Below are two links to the same directory and what it would look like if we had used the default / out of the box (OOTB) view(s) :