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Deep dives into design thinking, creative process, and the intersection of business and aesthetics.
Show me your top-level menu and I'll tell you what you actually sell.
Take a screenshot of your website's main navigation, crop out the logo, and show it to someone who doesn't know your business. Ask them what the company sells. If the answer is vague, or wrong, the menu isn't doing its main job.
Navigation tends to be treated as wayfinding: someone needs to reach a page, and the menu gets them there. Handled that way, it becomes an admin task, handed out late in a project and settled by whoever has the strongest opinion in the room.
That undersells it. Your main navigation is the most compressed statement of strategy your business publishes. Every visitor reads it, and search engines take cues from it about how the site fits together. When a menu is confused, the confusion usually started in the business, and the menu is just where it shows.
A menu forces the decisions you've been putting off
Building a navigation bar makes you settle things most businesses would happily leave for another year: which service leads, and whether the site is organised around what you do or who you do it for. Only a handful of items will be seen by every visitor, so each one has to earn its place.
Those are commercial questions with commercial answers. Menus drift towards nine items because nobody wants to be the person whose service got demoted, and the result reflects internal politics more than buyer priorities. Buyers pick up on that even when they couldn't tell you what's wrong.
Menus lose buyers in two ways
The first is being written in the company's language instead of the buyer's. Some menus are laid out like an org chart, with items named after internal departments or old divisions. The buyer doesn't know which department owns their problem and shouldn't have to find out, and every moment they spend decoding your structure is a moment not spent weighing up your offer.
Clever labels make the same mistake with more personality. Work becomes Chapters and Contact becomes Say Hello. The intention is charm, but every visitor pays a small price in thinking time, and the serious buyer in a hurry pays the most.
The second is refusing to choose. Nine or ten top-level items, several of them overlapping, usually means an argument about focus was settled by including every option.
None of these is fatal on its own. Combined, they produce a site where the buyer can't quickly find the page that would have convinced them.
Use the words a buyer would use with a colleague
The most reliable way to label things is the way a buyer would describe their situation to someone at the next desk.
A manufacturer doesn't wake up needing digital transformation. They wake up needing procurement managers to stop ringing with questions the website should have answered. Navigation that reflects the second way of putting it will do better than navigation built on the first, even when the service behind it is identical.
You can check your own menu against this. Write down the sentence a good-fit buyer would use to describe their problem. If none of your menu items share a word with it, your navigation is written in your language.
Every extra item takes something from the others
Adding an item to the menu feels free, but each one takes a share of attention from the rest, so promoting a minor service demotes your main one by the same amount.
On a phone the menu is already hidden behind a tap, and a long list there is much harder to scan than a short one. Check what share of your first visits arrive on a phone before deciding length doesn't matter. Search engines also take a cue from the main navigation about what's central to the site, and ten items on one level suggests nothing is.
The usual advice of five or six top-level items has a reason behind it. That's about as many options as most people can keep in mind while choosing between them.
Test your navigation on people who don't work for you
Arguments about navigation are usually won by whoever is most senior. They can be settled with evidence instead, and it doesn't cost much.
The first-click test is the most useful. Give five people outside the business a realistic task, such as finding out whether you work with companies their size, and note where each of them clicks first. If the first click is wrong, the label is wrong. It takes an afternoon and will tell you more than a month of internal debate.
If your site has its own search box, read what people type into it. That log is a list of things visitors couldn't find through the menu, and it usually goes unread.
The screenshot test from the top of this piece belongs here too. Run it on the current menu and on any proposed replacement, with people who haven't seen either.
The hard part is deciding what to drop
Better navigation mostly comes from removing items, and removal needs someone with the authority to say a service isn't a priority this year. That's why navigation projects stall. The design work is straightforward, but agreeing what leads is an organisational decision, and no amount of design can make it for you.
If your analytics show visitors moving between service pages without enquiring, they're often looking for the page that matches their problem and failing to find it. Book a call with Dave and we'll look at where buyers lose the thread on your site, and what a clearer structure would need you to decide.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Website design and build · Product and interface design · Selected brand and website work
Updated 24 September 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.
Show me your top-level menu and I'll tell you what you actually sell.
Take a screenshot of your website's main navigation, crop out the logo, and show it to someone who doesn't know your business. Ask them what the company sells. If the answer is vague, or wrong, the menu isn't doing its main job.
Navigation tends to be treated as wayfinding: someone needs to reach a page, and the menu gets them there. Handled that way, it becomes an admin task, handed out late in a project and settled by whoever has the strongest opinion in the room.
That undersells it. Your main navigation is the most compressed statement of strategy your business publishes. Every visitor reads it, and search engines take cues from it about how the site fits together. When a menu is confused, the confusion usually started in the business, and the menu is just where it shows.
A menu forces the decisions you've been putting off
Building a navigation bar makes you settle things most businesses would happily leave for another year: which service leads, and whether the site is organised around what you do or who you do it for. Only a handful of items will be seen by every visitor, so each one has to earn its place.
Those are commercial questions with commercial answers. Menus drift towards nine items because nobody wants to be the person whose service got demoted, and the result reflects internal politics more than buyer priorities. Buyers pick up on that even when they couldn't tell you what's wrong.
Menus lose buyers in two ways
The first is being written in the company's language instead of the buyer's. Some menus are laid out like an org chart, with items named after internal departments or old divisions. The buyer doesn't know which department owns their problem and shouldn't have to find out, and every moment they spend decoding your structure is a moment not spent weighing up your offer.
Clever labels make the same mistake with more personality. Work becomes Chapters and Contact becomes Say Hello. The intention is charm, but every visitor pays a small price in thinking time, and the serious buyer in a hurry pays the most.
The second is refusing to choose. Nine or ten top-level items, several of them overlapping, usually means an argument about focus was settled by including every option.
None of these is fatal on its own. Combined, they produce a site where the buyer can't quickly find the page that would have convinced them.
Use the words a buyer would use with a colleague
The most reliable way to label things is the way a buyer would describe their situation to someone at the next desk.
A manufacturer doesn't wake up needing digital transformation. They wake up needing procurement managers to stop ringing with questions the website should have answered. Navigation that reflects the second way of putting it will do better than navigation built on the first, even when the service behind it is identical.
You can check your own menu against this. Write down the sentence a good-fit buyer would use to describe their problem. If none of your menu items share a word with it, your navigation is written in your language.
Every extra item takes something from the others
Adding an item to the menu feels free, but each one takes a share of attention from the rest, so promoting a minor service demotes your main one by the same amount.
On a phone the menu is already hidden behind a tap, and a long list there is much harder to scan than a short one. Check what share of your first visits arrive on a phone before deciding length doesn't matter. Search engines also take a cue from the main navigation about what's central to the site, and ten items on one level suggests nothing is.
The usual advice of five or six top-level items has a reason behind it. That's about as many options as most people can keep in mind while choosing between them.
Test your navigation on people who don't work for you
Arguments about navigation are usually won by whoever is most senior. They can be settled with evidence instead, and it doesn't cost much.
The first-click test is the most useful. Give five people outside the business a realistic task, such as finding out whether you work with companies their size, and note where each of them clicks first. If the first click is wrong, the label is wrong. It takes an afternoon and will tell you more than a month of internal debate.
If your site has its own search box, read what people type into it. That log is a list of things visitors couldn't find through the menu, and it usually goes unread.
The screenshot test from the top of this piece belongs here too. Run it on the current menu and on any proposed replacement, with people who haven't seen either.
The hard part is deciding what to drop
Better navigation mostly comes from removing items, and removal needs someone with the authority to say a service isn't a priority this year. That's why navigation projects stall. The design work is straightforward, but agreeing what leads is an organisational decision, and no amount of design can make it for you.
If your analytics show visitors moving between service pages without enquiring, they're often looking for the page that matches their problem and failing to find it. Book a call with Dave and we'll look at where buyers lose the thread on your site, and what a clearer structure would need you to decide.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Website design and build · Product and interface design · Selected brand and website work
Updated 24 September 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.