A firm with six service lines has a navigation problem that a sole practitioner does not, and most of them solve it by copying the org chart into the menu bar. It was the most common structural mistake I saw across twelve years of building sites for accounting and advisory practices, and it is also the cheapest to fix - the work is in the labels, not the code.
Nearly every multi-service firm I worked with had the same menu, and it always came from the same place. Someone sat down with the practice management system open and copied the service lines straight out of it. Business Services. Assurance and Advisory. Corporate Finance. Client Accounting. Those are real divisions with real partners attached, and internally they mean something precise.
The trouble starts the moment that structure leaves the building. A department name is a statement about who does the work and who bills for it. It carries almost no information about what the work actually is.
Inside the firm everyone already knows, so nobody notices the gap. Outside it, the menu reads as six doors with no signs on them.
A visitor does not arrive at your site wanting a department. They arrive with a job. The Hamilton cafe owner whose bookkeeper resigned last week wants someone to run payroll and file GST. She has no view on whether that sits under Business Services or Client Accounting, and she is not going to click through four pages to work it out.
I watched this happen on session recordings more times than I care to count. The visitor opens the services menu, reads it twice, and goes to Contact instead - or leaves.
The menu did not confuse them into a bad choice. It gave them nothing to act on, so they fell back to the one label on the page they understood.
Here is the services menu I inherited from a four-partner Wellington firm, alongside the label we replaced each item with:
- Business Services became Tax and Compliance
- Assurance and Advisory became Audit
- Corporate Finance became Buying or Selling a Business
- Client Accounting became Bookkeeping and Payroll
- Specialist Services became Virtual CFO
- Wealth became Financial Planning
Nothing changed about who did the work or how it was billed. The internal names still existed in the engagement letters and on the org chart, which is where they belong.
What changed is that a visitor could match a label to a problem in about two seconds, which is roughly how long you get.
There is a simple test for a service label and it costs nothing to run. Would a client type this phrase into Google when they had the problem the service solves?
Nobody searches for assurance. They search for audit, or for who audits an incorporated society, or for our auditor has resigned. Nobody at all searches for specialist services. Very few people outside the profession search for virtual CFO either - that one is our word rather than theirs, and firms adopt it mostly because a competitor did.
A label does not have to be the search term. But when the gap between the two is wide enough that no reasonable person would connect them, the label is doing no work at all.
This is not an argument for scrubbing every technical term out of the menu. Some of them are the clearest words available and the client already knows them.
Audit is one. Tax is another. Payroll, GST, trust accounts - these are ordinary vocabulary for anyone running a business in New Zealand, and softening them into something friendlier makes the menu vaguer rather than warmer. I have seen Tax turned into Keeping You Compliant, which manages to be both longer and less specific.
The distinction that matters is whether the term describes the work or describes your internal grouping of the work. Audit describes work. Assurance and Advisory describes a partner's portfolio. Keep the first kind and translate the second.
You do not need a usability study for this. Three sources will tell you most of what you need and you already have all three:
- Your inbox, and the subject lines clients write when they ask for something. That is their language, unedited.
- Search Console, and the queries already reaching your site. If nobody lands on the Assurance page via a search containing the word assurance, you have your answer.
- Whoever answers the phone, who hears the same six openings every week and can recite them from memory.
Then ask five clients to point at the menu item they would click to get their annual accounts done. If two of them hesitate, the label is wrong.
Mega menus - the full-width panels that drop down with columns of links - exist to solve a problem of scale. When a firm has ninety service pages across eleven countries, a panel showing forty at once is a reasonable answer to a genuine difficulty.
A New Zealand firm with six service lines and perhaps eighteen pages does not have that problem. What it usually has instead is a mega menu built to look like the ones the international networks use, with the columns padded out by promoting subheadings into links so the panel does not sit there half empty.
I have never seen that convert better than a plain six-item dropdown. It costs more to build, it breaks more often on mobile, and it makes a small firm look like it is dressing up.
Depth is the other place firms overbuild. The rule I use is short: services in the menu, sub-services on the service page, and nothing below that anywhere in the navigation.
Two levels covers almost every firm of this size I have worked with. If Audit genuinely needs children - incorporated societies, schools, financial statement reviews - they can sit as a dropdown under Audit, but only where each one is a page a client would land on directly from a search. If they exist for tidiness, they belong as sections on the Audit page instead.
Three levels produces a page four clicks from the homepage that will be found by nobody. If a page matters, promote it. If it does not, do not build it.
The menu is not a site map and it should stop trying to be one. Six services, About, Insights if you actually publish, and Contact. That is a complete top-level navigation for a firm of this size.
Adding Careers, Resources, Client Login and Pay Your Invoice alongside them does not help anyone. Those go in the footer or a small utility bar above the header, which is where people already look for them.
Everything the menu cannot say, the services landing page says. That is where you can afford a sentence per service, a line about who each one is for, and a starting price if you publish one. The menu's only job is to get someone onto the right page. The page does the persuading.
The firms that get this right are rarely the ones with the best-designed menus. They are the ones willing to let go of names their partners had used for fifteen years, because those names were never for the partners in the first place. Navigation is the only part of a website that every single visitor touches, and it is almost always the part that gets the least thought.
