Fourth post in the BLOOM series. This one’s Order, and it’s the letter that decides whether people can actually use the site once they’ve landed on it.
Does your site lead someone somewhere, or is it a pretty brochure that nobody clicks past the homepage?
Structure and path
A website is a path. Someone lands, and then what? Where does your menu send them? Does the flow from page to page make sense, or does it require someone to already know your business to figure out where to click?
I think about this the way I’d think about walking a new client through my own process for the first time. [Think Disney’s park maps: nobody’s wandering through Magic Kingdom just quessing where Space Mountain is] I don’t just hand them a pile of information and say good luck. I lead them, one clear step at a time. Your website should do the same thing for every visitor, automatically, without you standing there explaining it.
That means thinking through the actual journey: what does someone need to see first, what question comes next, and where do you want them to end up. Menus, page flow, and internal links all work to get someone from “just landed here” to “I know what to do next.”
I ask every client the same question before I touch a sitemap: what’s the one thing you want a visitor to do? Book a call, buy the thing, join the list, whatever it is. Once I know that answer, every menu item and every internal link gets built to move someone toward it, not just exist because a template came with seven nav slots and we filled all seven.
Order includes every visitor
Order means everyone can find their way around, including someone using a screen reader.
This one gets skipped constantly, and it shouldn’t. WebAIM’s screen reader survey, one of the longest-running studies on how people actually navigate the web with assistive technology, makes it clear that screen reader users rely heavily on proper structure: clear headings, logical navigation, labeled links, a real path through the page. When that structure is missing or broken, the site isn’t just harder to use. For a meaningful chunk of visitors, the site becomes unusable.
Screen reader users are part of your audience, so building for them is part of the job.
Before every site launch, I check heading order, alt text, link labels that actually describe where a link goes instead of a lonely “click here.” None of it is dramatic work, but it’s invisible when it’s done right and devastating when it’s skipped.
What a site without Order looks like
I inherited a client site once with fourteen items in the main menu. Fourteen. Nobody reads fourteen menu items, they just get overwhelmed and pick the one that’s easiest to understand, which is rarely the one that actually makes the business money. We cut it to five. Bookings went up before we changed a single word of copy.
You’ve probably visited a site like that too: gorgeous homepage, and then nothing. No clear next step, a menu with ten items and no obvious priority, pages that exist but aren’t linked from anywhere a normal visitor would find, and a contact page three clicks deep because nobody thought about how someone actually gets there.
The fix is usually fewer, better connected pages, with a clear idea of where you want each type of visitor to end up.
Why this comes after Offer
Order only matters once Offer is solved. There’s no point building a beautiful path through a site if nobody understands what they’re being led toward in the first place. Get the offer clear, then build the road that gets people there.
A site with great Order and a fuzzy Offer just moves people efficiently toward confusion. Solve the message first, then make it easy to act on.
If your site has more pages than purpose right now, that’s usually the sign. Pull up your own navigation, count the items, and ask whether each one earns its spot or is just there because it always has been.
