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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.
Check how easily people can open, scan and use the menu on a phone. Main navigation also helps explain the relationship between important pages. The test is whether the hierarchy makes sense for your content and visitors, rather than whether it fits a fixed item count.
There is no universal correct number of menu items. Use the smallest set that lets your actual visitors recognise the routes they need, then test those routes on a phone and with people outside the business.
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.
A first-click task is a useful starting point. Ask people outside the business to find out whether you work with organisations like theirs, and observe where they go first. Investigate a wrong turn across the label, content and layout. A small test can reveal obvious problems, but it is not a representative estimate of how every buyer will behave.
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.
A worksheet for your next website brief
For each important audience, complete the following six lines before discussing menu labels. Keep the answers short enough that the team can compare them in a workshop.
Audience: who is arriving, and what situation brought them here?
Decision: what must they understand before they can take the next step?
Evidence: which project, explanation or verified fact supports that decision?
Page: where will that answer live, and what label would the visitor recognise?
Owner: who supplies, checks and maintains that content in the CMS?
Next step: what useful action follows, and what should happen after it?
Example: a manufacturer comparing website suppliers
This is an illustrative planning example, rather than a measured client result. An engineering buyer may need to understand capabilities, inspect relevant work and send a technical enquiry. A menu labelled “Company / Solutions / More” leaves the team to explain what those words mean. Testing “Capabilities / Work / About / Contact” gives the buyer clearer candidate routes, but the right final labels still depend on the organisation.
The capabilities page might need process information and a clear route to send a specification. The work page needs evidence of the supplier’s actual role. Assign someone to keep each record current, and decide which fields an editor can change without altering the layout. A page title and a menu label do not have to be identical.
Test a route before approving the sitemap
Give a representative visitor a task such as “Find out whether this team can explain a technical product range, then enquire about a redesign.” Observe their first choice, whether they find enough evidence and whether they understand the next step. If they struggle, investigate the label, content and route together. One wrong click does not establish that the label alone is the cause.
Use the same task on the phone version, with keyboard navigation and with a longer realistic heading. Record the change you make and repeat the task. The output is a brief containing audiences, page purposes, evidence, content responsibilities and enquiry routes, rather than a list of headings everyone has agreed to tolerate.
For a relevant example of technical website content, see SCS Precision Components. Our website design service explains how strategy, content and development fit into the delivery.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Website design and build · Product and interface design · Selected brand and website work
Updated 16 October 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.
Check how easily people can open, scan and use the menu on a phone. Main navigation also helps explain the relationship between important pages. The test is whether the hierarchy makes sense for your content and visitors, rather than whether it fits a fixed item count.
There is no universal correct number of menu items. Use the smallest set that lets your actual visitors recognise the routes they need, then test those routes on a phone and with people outside the business.
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.
A first-click task is a useful starting point. Ask people outside the business to find out whether you work with organisations like theirs, and observe where they go first. Investigate a wrong turn across the label, content and layout. A small test can reveal obvious problems, but it is not a representative estimate of how every buyer will behave.
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.
A worksheet for your next website brief
For each important audience, complete the following six lines before discussing menu labels. Keep the answers short enough that the team can compare them in a workshop.
Audience: who is arriving, and what situation brought them here?
Decision: what must they understand before they can take the next step?
Evidence: which project, explanation or verified fact supports that decision?
Page: where will that answer live, and what label would the visitor recognise?
Owner: who supplies, checks and maintains that content in the CMS?
Next step: what useful action follows, and what should happen after it?
Example: a manufacturer comparing website suppliers
This is an illustrative planning example, rather than a measured client result. An engineering buyer may need to understand capabilities, inspect relevant work and send a technical enquiry. A menu labelled “Company / Solutions / More” leaves the team to explain what those words mean. Testing “Capabilities / Work / About / Contact” gives the buyer clearer candidate routes, but the right final labels still depend on the organisation.
The capabilities page might need process information and a clear route to send a specification. The work page needs evidence of the supplier’s actual role. Assign someone to keep each record current, and decide which fields an editor can change without altering the layout. A page title and a menu label do not have to be identical.
Test a route before approving the sitemap
Give a representative visitor a task such as “Find out whether this team can explain a technical product range, then enquire about a redesign.” Observe their first choice, whether they find enough evidence and whether they understand the next step. If they struggle, investigate the label, content and route together. One wrong click does not establish that the label alone is the cause.
Use the same task on the phone version, with keyboard navigation and with a longer realistic heading. Record the change you make and repeat the task. The output is a brief containing audiences, page purposes, evidence, content responsibilities and enquiry routes, rather than a list of headings everyone has agreed to tolerate.
For a relevant example of technical website content, see SCS Precision Components. Our website design service explains how strategy, content and development fit into the delivery.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Website design and build · Product and interface design · Selected brand and website work
Updated 16 October 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.