The main navigation of a website is a rigorously structured plan, a bit like the table of contents in a book, but one where we have no expectation that the visitor will read it in a linear way: quite the opposite, in fact.

It’s only one of the ways that people could move around your site — and possibly not the most important one: it could be the search field, for example — but it’s a critical way to make sure fundamentals are visible and accessible on every page.

Navigation mainly features a nested list of pages because they are likely to stay relatively static: they’re not usually time sensitive (unlike events or news). They’ll only need changing once in a while, but they should periodically be updated.

Posts on the other hand are more ephemeral: they’re usually relevant for particular timeframes, and most Content Management Systems (CMSs, like WordPress) offer extra mechanisms beyond menus for sorting them by meta information like date, category, tag, or author.

Inevitably, your website won’t fit the model below neatly (this one doesn’t!), but this should help you think your own structure through.

Categorising your main menu: organising principles

Imagine we’re looking at the topbar of an arbitrary website, which is where many main navigation menus are located. Reading left to right, these are some suggestions for how to group / categorise your content:

Introductions
Pages about who you are, your business or project history:

• You could say something about your affiliations (if, for example, you’re a branch of a larger organisation).
• What makes you different from notionally similar operations? Why should I engage with you, not to someone else?
• You should say why your are qualified or competent to offer the service that you do.
• You should also describe your management tree or your governance model if you’re a not-for-profit: who’s responsible, how is accountability overseen.

Activity
Pages about what it is that you do: what services you offer, what problem(s) you are purporting to solve. This might be a good category for pages describing where you’re based and maybe how to get there. Is there any training, or knowledge required for me to be able to engage? Pages about that under here.

Engagement
This can mean the products you sell, services you offer, your event / workshop programme, in fact anything that you want to invite your visitor to do. This is where I buy or book my product or service.

Context
General or reference information about your business context. This can mean articles, documentation, troubleshooting or tech support. Present yourself overtly as an expert in your area of activity. This is primarily for static information: issues that won’t change much, if at all, or highly infrequently; it’s a reference area.

News
This should be used for information that’s moving on regularly, for ideas that are evolving (but this post is where you’re at right now), responses to relevant current affairs, but all related to whatever it is your business does. Press releases, service notices, pre-event motivation, post-event debriefs (but not events themselves). Assume that everything is transient, likely to go out of date quickly, and that the most important information is the post right at the top.

Menu depth: how far down the rabbit hole?

Avoid nesting your navigation more than about three levels deep. It gets difficult to manage and climb down dropdowns further than that, and the user may well loose track of where they are, undermining the objective. If it looks like you need further levels of organisation, then talk it through with your designer.

Item labels

At all points think hard about your menu’s itemised labels: context! context! context! Go from the most general to the most specific and:

• Keep them as short as possible.
• Make them directive: try to say exactly what the page is going to offer.
• Don’t feel compelled to copy the page / article / post heading if it’s not clear, or too long for the menu item.

Navigation in the the overall link strategy

The principle opportunity and work in building an effective website — a non-linear collection of pages — is the building of links. So, for example, on a workshop booking page under the engagement category:

Have a link to the page about your qualifications, but:

• Don’t repeat them, only add specifics about why you’re qualified for this particular, workshop. The common information could be under the introductions category.
• Have a link to the page of booking requirements, and again, don’t repeat the common ones, but use the space to emphasise specifics (maybe a prior course or training). That could be under the activity category.

Only write as much as necessary on a given topic: tangents should be put into a parallel page: that’s why this page on writing for the Web exists, for example, even though its directly applicable here. Common information should be too, so don’t repeat yourself unless you’re going to loose the sale / booking if the user needs to keep flipping between pages to feel confident in engaging.