Navigation isn’t just a design choice. It’s infrastructure. And if it isn’t built on a strong foundation, you’ll feel it post-launch, when your client is poking around their shiny new site and suddenly realizing they can’t find half the content they asked for.

We’ve seen it enough times to know it’s worth talking about: navigation can’t just be designed in a vacuum, and it certainly can’t be scoped as an afterthought. It’s one of the most important (and most misunderstood) parts of a digital project, and it works best when designers and developers collaborate early, and when the client is willing to challenge their own assumptions.

Before you even think about top nav, sticky headers, or mobile menus, you need to understand what the site is meant to do. That means:

When the IA is strong, the navigation often falls naturally into place. When it’s weak, you end up band-aiding your way through the build and making compromises that frustrate users and limit growth.

We’ve built sites where a hamburger menu on desktop worked well because the content was minimal, the goals were clear, and the layout supported that decision. But we’ve also had to rebuild navigation structures post-launch when those same patterns didn’t support more complex content needs.

There’s no universal "wrong" design decision. It all comes down to context, and that starts with IA.

Designers bring incredible UX instincts to the table, and often have a strong grasp of user behavior and brand storytelling. But it’s easy to get caught up in inspiration sites and visual aesthetics, especially when clients are pushing for something they saw on Apple’s website.

The reality is, your client isn’t Apple. And their content probably doesn’t mirror the slick one-page scroll they sent you as a reference. Your job is to help them understand what works for their users, and that starts with realistic expectations about what kind of navigation structure will support their goals.

That doesn’t mean saying no to bold creative ideas. It just means testing those ideas against the content, goals, and constraints of the actual project. That’s where dev comes in.

As developers, we’re often handed final designs with navigation baked in; menus, drop-downs, accordions, mobile states, all with the assumption that the IA is solid and the structure has been tested.

Sometimes that’s true. But more often than we’d like, once the build is complete and the client starts using the CMS, they realize it doesn’t work the way they thought it would. Or worse, they ask for changes that weren’t scoped, and now the nav needs to be re-architected.

We’re happy to build anything. But it’s always better (and more cost-effective) to pressure-test navigation early. We can:

Bringing dev in early also helps avoid the dreaded post-launch nav rebuild, which eats up timelines, budgets, and good will.

We’ve seen it enough times to know it’s worth talking about: a site gets built exactly to spec, only for the client to realize post-launch that the navigation looked great but didn’t really work for their content.

It’s not about blame. It’s about how navigation often gets treated like a design flourish instead of what it really is, a functional system. Clients bring examples they love (and that do work—for those brands), but those same structures can fall apart under a different content model.

As a dev team, we can build anything. But redoing navigation after launch is expensive, time-consuming, and frustrating for everyone. The best outcomes happen when designers advocate early for nav systems that support real structure and goals, not just the client’s Pinterest board.

When we collaborate early, we can design and build navigation that’s scalable, accessible, intuitive and that holds up when the client's team starts using it.

If you’re second-guessing a nav structure or trying to translate a wishlist into something functional, bring us in early. We’ll help pressure-test it before it becomes a problem.