Most people start a company site by browsing theme demos. But choosing the screen first means fitting your business into a menu count and page arrangement that someone else decided. The order is backwards — decide what goes in, then choose the container.
Working out the structure takes one sheet of paper and half an hour, and that half hour shortens everything afterwards. Without it, you stall on “where does this page go?” every time you build a screen.
Start with a list of pages
The first step is simply writing down the name of every page you intend to build, with no thought given to design. Two kinds of page will be mixed together in that list: pages visitors come looking for (services, how you work, contact) and pages that must exist but nobody seeks out (terms, privacy policy). That distinction is already your navigation design.
Two levels deep, no more
Past about ten pages you will want to group things. Make a maximum depth of two your rule: from the home page, two clicks should reach anything.
Depth makes two things worse at once. Visitors stop knowing that the inner pages exist, and search engines follow fewer links the deeper they go. A service detail page buried three levels down becomes a page you built that nobody reads.
If a group would only hold two or three items, do not create a submenu — put them on one page as sections instead. The test for splitting a page is not its length but whether people search for that topic on its own.
A menu is a choice, not an index
There is a strong pull towards putting every page in the top menu. But a menu is not a sitemap; it is the order you recommend to a visitor. Put the four or five destinations that matter up there and move the rest to the footer.
Watch especially for pages nothing links to. A page you built but never added to a menu is unreachable for visitors and crawlers alike; if only someone who knows the URL can see it, it effectively does not exist.
The URL shows the structure
Settle the structure and the addresses settle with it. A URL such as /service/website-care/ tells a visitor where they are and tells a search result what the page is about before anyone clicks.
Bear in mind that URLs are expensive to change later. Every shared and indexed address breaks, so a move has to ship with 301 redirects from the old ones. Deciding the structure first is, in the end, how you protect your addresses.
The relationship between structure and search visibility is covered further in the SEO archive, and a structural review of an existing site is part of the diagnostic in our optimization program.
Next part
With the structure set, it is time to write what goes inside it. The next part is about order — write the copy first and you only build the site once.