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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 will tell you what you actually sell.
Navigation is usually treated as a wayfinding problem. Someone needs to reach a page, and the menu helps them do it. Handled that way, it becomes an administrative task delegated late in a project and settled by whoever has the strongest opinion in the room.
This underestimates it considerably. Your primary navigation is the most compressed statement of strategy your business publishes. It is read by every visitor, it is the first thing a search engine uses to understand your structure, and it silently communicates what you consider important.
When a menu is confused, the confusion is rarely in the menu. It is in the business.
The menu is a strategy document
A navigation bar forces decisions that businesses otherwise defer indefinitely. What are we primarily selling. Which service leads. Are we organised by what we do or by who we serve. What is important enough to occupy one of six slots that every visitor will see.
These questions have commercial answers, and the reason menus drift towards nine items is that nobody wants to be the person whose service was demoted. The result is a structure that reflects internal politics rather than buyer priority, and buyers can feel it even when they cannot name it.
Three patterns that leak revenue
Certain structures recur across sites that underperform, and each has a predictable cost.
The org chart menu: Items named after internal departments or legacy divisions. The buyer does not know which department owns their problem, and should not be required to learn. Every moment spent decoding your structure is a moment not spent evaluating your offer.
The everything menu: Nine or ten top-level items, often with overlapping meanings. When everything is promoted, nothing is. This pattern typically indicates an unresolved argument about focus that was settled by including all options.
The clever menu: Invented names for standard concepts. Work becomes Chapters. Services becomes What We Make. Contact becomes Say Hello. The intention is personality; the effect is a small cognitive tax on every visitor, paid most heavily by the serious buyer in a hurry.
None of these are fatal individually. Combined, they produce a site where the buyer cannot quickly locate the page that would have convinced them.
Organise around the problem, not the org chart
The most reliable structural principle is to name things the way a buyer would describe their situation to a colleague.
A manufacturer does not wake up needing "digital transformation". They wake up needing procurement managers to stop ringing to ask questions that should have been answered on the website. Navigation that reflects the second framing performs better than navigation reflecting the first, even when the underlying service is identical.
There is a practical test. Write down the sentence a good-fit buyer would use to describe their problem. If none of your menu items contain any of those words, your navigation is written in your language rather than theirs.
The cost of one extra item
Adding a menu item feels free. It is not, and the cost is paid in three places.
Attention: Every item reduces the share of attention available to the others. Promoting a minor service demotes your primary one by the same amount.
Mobile viability: On a phone the menu is already collapsed. A long list behind a single tap is materially harder to scan than a short one, and the majority of first visits to most Irish service sites are on a phone.
Structural signal: Search systems interpret your primary navigation as a statement about relative importance. Flattening ten items into one level tells them nothing is central.
Five or six top-level items is not a design convention. It is roughly the point at which a person can hold the set in working memory while deciding.
How to test it properly
Navigation arguments are usually settled by seniority. They can be settled by evidence instead, cheaply.
The first-click test: Give five people outside your business a realistic task and record where they click first. If the first click is wrong, the label is wrong. This takes an afternoon and is more informative than a month of internal debate.
The stranger test: Show the menu alone, with no logo and no page content, and ask what the company sells. If the answer is vague, the menu is not doing its primary job.
Read the search data: Your internal site search, if you have it, is a list of things people could not find. It is the most direct feedback available and it is almost always ignored.
Editing is the hard part
Improving navigation is rarely a matter of adding clarity. It is a matter of removing items, and removal requires someone with the authority to decide that a service is not a priority this year.
That is why navigation projects stall. The design work is straightforward. The organisational work of agreeing what leads is not, and no amount of design can substitute for that decision being made.
The Next Step
If your analytics show visitors moving between service pages without converting, they are frequently not comparing options. They are looking for the page that matches their problem and failing to find it.
We do not do hard sales pitches. We prefer to diagnose whether we are actually a good fit for your current challenges.
Let's have a pragmatic conversation about your business. Book a brief, zero-obligation consultation with me directly. We will review how your site is structured, where buyers are losing the thread, and what a clearer structure would require.
Schedule a brief consultation here: https://brainstorm.ie/meeting
Related Brainstorm services and work
Website design and build · Product and interface design · Selected brand and website work
Reviewed 30 July 2026 by Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm. Dave leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.
Show me your top-level menu and I will tell you what you actually sell.
Navigation is usually treated as a wayfinding problem. Someone needs to reach a page, and the menu helps them do it. Handled that way, it becomes an administrative task delegated late in a project and settled by whoever has the strongest opinion in the room.
This underestimates it considerably. Your primary navigation is the most compressed statement of strategy your business publishes. It is read by every visitor, it is the first thing a search engine uses to understand your structure, and it silently communicates what you consider important.
When a menu is confused, the confusion is rarely in the menu. It is in the business.
The menu is a strategy document
A navigation bar forces decisions that businesses otherwise defer indefinitely. What are we primarily selling. Which service leads. Are we organised by what we do or by who we serve. What is important enough to occupy one of six slots that every visitor will see.
These questions have commercial answers, and the reason menus drift towards nine items is that nobody wants to be the person whose service was demoted. The result is a structure that reflects internal politics rather than buyer priority, and buyers can feel it even when they cannot name it.
Three patterns that leak revenue
Certain structures recur across sites that underperform, and each has a predictable cost.
The org chart menu: Items named after internal departments or legacy divisions. The buyer does not know which department owns their problem, and should not be required to learn. Every moment spent decoding your structure is a moment not spent evaluating your offer.
The everything menu: Nine or ten top-level items, often with overlapping meanings. When everything is promoted, nothing is. This pattern typically indicates an unresolved argument about focus that was settled by including all options.
The clever menu: Invented names for standard concepts. Work becomes Chapters. Services becomes What We Make. Contact becomes Say Hello. The intention is personality; the effect is a small cognitive tax on every visitor, paid most heavily by the serious buyer in a hurry.
None of these are fatal individually. Combined, they produce a site where the buyer cannot quickly locate the page that would have convinced them.
Organise around the problem, not the org chart
The most reliable structural principle is to name things the way a buyer would describe their situation to a colleague.
A manufacturer does not wake up needing "digital transformation". They wake up needing procurement managers to stop ringing to ask questions that should have been answered on the website. Navigation that reflects the second framing performs better than navigation reflecting the first, even when the underlying service is identical.
There is a practical test. Write down the sentence a good-fit buyer would use to describe their problem. If none of your menu items contain any of those words, your navigation is written in your language rather than theirs.
The cost of one extra item
Adding a menu item feels free. It is not, and the cost is paid in three places.
Attention: Every item reduces the share of attention available to the others. Promoting a minor service demotes your primary one by the same amount.
Mobile viability: On a phone the menu is already collapsed. A long list behind a single tap is materially harder to scan than a short one, and the majority of first visits to most Irish service sites are on a phone.
Structural signal: Search systems interpret your primary navigation as a statement about relative importance. Flattening ten items into one level tells them nothing is central.
Five or six top-level items is not a design convention. It is roughly the point at which a person can hold the set in working memory while deciding.
How to test it properly
Navigation arguments are usually settled by seniority. They can be settled by evidence instead, cheaply.
The first-click test: Give five people outside your business a realistic task and record where they click first. If the first click is wrong, the label is wrong. This takes an afternoon and is more informative than a month of internal debate.
The stranger test: Show the menu alone, with no logo and no page content, and ask what the company sells. If the answer is vague, the menu is not doing its primary job.
Read the search data: Your internal site search, if you have it, is a list of things people could not find. It is the most direct feedback available and it is almost always ignored.
Editing is the hard part
Improving navigation is rarely a matter of adding clarity. It is a matter of removing items, and removal requires someone with the authority to decide that a service is not a priority this year.
That is why navigation projects stall. The design work is straightforward. The organisational work of agreeing what leads is not, and no amount of design can substitute for that decision being made.
The Next Step
If your analytics show visitors moving between service pages without converting, they are frequently not comparing options. They are looking for the page that matches their problem and failing to find it.
We do not do hard sales pitches. We prefer to diagnose whether we are actually a good fit for your current challenges.
Let's have a pragmatic conversation about your business. Book a brief, zero-obligation consultation with me directly. We will review how your site is structured, where buyers are losing the thread, and what a clearer structure would require.
Schedule a brief consultation here: https://brainstorm.ie/meeting
Related Brainstorm services and work
Website design and build · Product and interface design · Selected brand and website work
Reviewed 30 July 2026 by Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm. Dave leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.