Structure is the part of a website that decides whether people find things, and it is almost always skipped. Design starts, pages get invented to fill a navigation bar, and the site ends up organised around how the business sees itself rather than what visitors came for.
This guide covers how to work out the structure first. It needs sticky notes or a spreadsheet, a couple of hours, and ideally two people.
- 1
Collect the real questions
Go through your sent emails, enquiry forms and phone notes from the last three months and write down every question a customer actually asked. Do not paraphrase into marketing language. You will typically end up with forty to sixty, and a lot of repetition — the repetition is the useful part.
- 2
Group the questions into themes
Sort them into piles by what they are fundamentally about, not by which department handles them. Do not name the piles yet. Let the grouping happen first, because naming too early forces questions into categories that made sense to you rather than to a customer.
- 3
Name each pile in the customer’s words
Now name the piles, using the language the questions themselves used. If everyone asks about "getting a quote", the section is not called "Commercial Enquiries". Your internal names are almost never the right public ones — this is where most navigation goes wrong.
- 4
Turn each pile into one page, or split it
One theme is usually one page. If a pile has more than about eight distinct questions it probably wants splitting; fewer than two and it probably belongs inside another page. Resist making a page for something nobody asked about, however much you want to talk about it.
- 5
Decide what goes in the main navigation
Five to seven items maximum. Anything more and people stop reading them. The main navigation should reflect the most common visitor journeys, not your org chart. Everything else lives in the footer or inside a section — that is not a demotion, it is a hierarchy.
- 6
Map the route to an enquiry from every page
For each page, write down what someone should do next and how they do it. If a page has no next step, it is a dead end, and dead ends are where people leave. This is also how you find out you have twelve pages all pointing at one overloaded contact form.
- 7
Test the structure before it is built
Write the page names on cards, hand them to someone outside the business, and ask them where they would look for five specific things. If they hesitate or guess wrong, the naming is not working. Fixing this now costs an afternoon; fixing it after launch costs a rebuild.
Why this comes before design
A designer given a clear structure can design a site that works. A designer given a logo and a vague scope will produce something that looks good and organises your business the way it looked from outside on the day they started.
Structure also outlives design. Most sites are redesigned every three to five years, but a structure built around genuine customer questions tends to survive several visual refreshes intact.
Frequently asked questions
The same method applies, but the grouping matters far more. Large catalogues usually need a filtering system rather than a page per item in the navigation, and the structure work becomes about defining useful filters.
Would rather we did it?
These guides are here so you can do it yourself. If you would rather hand it over, that is what we do.
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