In Vietnam, almost every restaurant has the same sign. Bright yellow board, red name across the top, a column of food photos, phone number in a strip at the bottom.
I noticed it on a recent family trip and started photographing them, because the sameness became funny. Sign after sign, town after town, the same yellow board.
My first thought was the obvious one. Where’s the originality? Where’s the brand personality?
Then I watched how effective they actually were.
A tourist who speaks no Vietnamese walks past, sees the photos, points at the grilled chicken, and dinner is sorted.
The sign format is identical everywhere because it solves the same problem everywhere. Somebody cracked it years ago, and every town with tourists sensibly copied the answer.
Those signs might be unimaginative, but they’re using a format that works.
And that’s exactly the conversation I have with clients, more often than you’d think, about their website navigation labels.
What Should You Call Your Website Navigation Links?
Use the standard labels visitors expect: Home, About, Services, Blog, Contact, and Shop if you sell products. Research into how people scan websites consistently shows that visitors find familiar navigation labels faster, and anything a visitor has to figure out or work hard to decipher, creates friction.
Creative alternatives like “Musings” or “The Treasure Chest” make people stop and consider what’s behind the click, and some of them will simply leave instead.
That’s the short answer. The rest of this post is about why the boring answer wins, and where your creativity genuinely belongs instead.
Why Do People Want Creative Menu Names?
Because a standard menu bar feels like handing in beige homework. In over 20 years of building websites, I’ve watched clients turn their blog into “Musings,” their resources page into “The Treasure Chest,” and their about page into “Behind the Curtain.” The instinct comes from a good place: you’ve worked hard to build a brand with personality, and Home, About, Services, Blog, Contact expresses none of it.
I understand the instinct completely. Nobody starts a business to sound like everybody else.
But there is a distinction that matters. Your navigation isn’t where your personality lives. It’s signage. Its whole job is to be understood in half a second by someone who has never met you, exactly like a yellow restaurant board on a street full of peckish tourists.
Do Clever Navigation Labels Hurt Conversions?
Yes, clever navigation labels can cost you enquiries without you ever realising it. When a visitor wants to read your articles, they scan the menu for the word Blog. If they find “Musings” or “Stories from the Fold” instead, they have to stop and work out what it means. Most visitors will try to figure it out. Some won’t bother. And because they leave without announcing their departure, you never find out which enquiries the creative label cost you.
A confusing label or website, doesn’t usually generate complaints. Nobody emails you to say they couldn’t find your services page. They just close the tab and open your competitor’s site, where the services page is called Services.
Website visitors arrive with a question and a limited supply of patience. Every second they spend decoding your menu is a second they’re not spending reading your message. On a website, this kind of friction invites potential clients to fall through the gaps.
Which Navigation Labels Do Visitors Expect?
These are the labels visitors recognise instantly, and what each one should link to:
- Home: your home page
- About: who you are and why you do this work
- Services (or Work With Me): what you offer and how to buy it
- Blog: your articles
- Resources: free tools, guides, downloads
- Contact: how to reach you
- Shop: products, if you sell them
“Work With Me” is an acceptable replacement I regularly recommend for coaches and therapists, because it’s warmer than Services while still being instantly understood. That’s the test for any label: would a stranger know what’s behind it without clicking? If the answer is no, it doesn’t belong in your menu.
Where Should Your Creativity Go Instead?
Put your personality into your headline, your about page, and the way you describe what you do, because that’s where sounding like everyone else genuinely costs you. Navigation labels are compared against a universal standard, but your message is compared against your competitors. A distinctive message wins clients. A distinctive menu bar just slows them down.
Think about what each part of your website is for. The menu exists so people can get around. Your headline exists to make the right person think “this is for me.” Your about page exists to make them trust you. Those last two jobs can’t be done with borrowed words, and this is where most websites play it far too safe.
I see it constantly in website reviews: a perfectly conventional menu bar sitting above a headline that could belong to any of a hundred other coaches. The owner spent their creative energy renaming the blog, then wrote “I help ambitious women create a life they love” across the top of the page. That’s creativity in exactly the wrong place.
So the split is this. Menu bar: boring. Message: unmistakably you.
Your website needs both halves: the boring, dependable signage that gets people around, and the deliberate, distinctive message that makes them stay. Get the split right and each part does its job. Get it backwards, with a quirky menu and a safe message, and you’ve built a site that’s hard to use and easy to forget.
How to Check Your Own Website Navigation
Open your website and look at your menu bar as if you’d never seen it before. Then ask three questions:
- Could a complete stranger predict what’s behind every link without clicking?
- Is anything in the menu that fewer than half your visitors would need? (If so, move it to the footer.)
- Have you spent more creative energy on your menu labels than on your headline?
If question three stings a little, you’re in good company, and it’s very fixable. Renaming “Musings” back to Blog takes two minutes. Writing a headline no competitor could borrow takes longer, but that’s the work that actually grows a business.
And if you’d like a second pair of eyes, my £47 website review does exactly this. I go through your site the way a real visitor would and show you what to standardise, what to say more bravely, and where a clever label might be quietly costing you clicks.
You can also take the free Sleeping Beauty Challenge first. It takes two minutes and tells you whether your website is one of the pretty ones that’s quietly asleep on the job.
0 Comments