Notes for owners · Websites and conversion
Website structure for a business with thirty services
How to group thirty services by the buyer's problem instead of your departments, so a stranger on a phone finds the right page in a few taps, with an index-card method to test it.
The GullySales team · Updated 17 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
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Group the thirty by the problem the buyer arrives with, not by your own departments, and show five to seven groups in the menu. Each group gets a page that names the problem and lists the services that solve it. Each service keeps its own page, linked from the group and from its neighbours. Test the grouping with index cards. You need three people who do not work for you.
Why the organisation chart makes a bad menu
Your departments are a fact about how you divide the work. Your buyer knows nothing about it. A school uniform supplier, for instance, might have "Stitching", "Embroidery", "Procurement" and "Logistics" as internal teams. A principal looking for uniforms thinks "uniforms for 600 students by June", and does not know which team does which.
When a menu copies the org chart, the buyer must guess where their problem sits. Guessing on a phone, with a thumb, is where they give up. The exercise below uses the buyer's own words instead.
The index-card method
You need an afternoon, a stack of cards, and three people who are not on your staff: a past customer, a friend in the same kind of work, and a relative who has never bought from you.
- Write each of your thirty services on its own card, in plain words. Remove words only your team uses.
- Ask each person to sort the cards into piles that belong together. Then ask them to name each pile in their own words, as if telling a friend what they were looking for.
- Photograph the piles and the names they chose.
- Compare the three results. Where two or three people put a card in the same pile, that is a group. Where all three disagree, the service is badly named or belongs in two places.
- Note the pile names. Those words, not yours, become your headings.
Do not explain or defend your categories while they sort. If you find yourself saying "no, that one is actually under Projects", you have found a problem.
From piles to a structure
Aim for five to seven groups. Under each, list no more than about eight services. When a group grows past that, split it by a clear difference: size of job, type of customer, or stage of the work.
| Level | What it holds | Example for an IT support firm |
|---|---|---|
| Home | The main promise, the groups, a way to get in touch | "We fix and set up your office technology." |
| Group page | The buyer's problem, the services that solve it, a short guide to choosing | "Things that have stopped working" |
| Service page | One service: for whom, what is included, how it is done, how to ask | "Printer repair for schools and offices" |
| Support pages | Proof, about, contact, common questions | Linked from the footer and from relevant services |
A service can appear under two groups when buyers genuinely look in both. The service has one page and one address, and both groups link to it. Avoid copying the page, because copies compete and confuse.
Rules for a menu that works on a phone
Keep the top-level menu to the groups plus contact. Show the phone number or a call button outside the menu, since the menu itself hides behind an icon.
Give each group page a short sentence at the top that begins with the buyer's situation. Then list services as cards with a one-line description in plain words. A bare list of names forces a tap on each to see what it is.
On every service page, add two or three links to the nearest related services and one back to the group. A visitor who arrives by search lands on a single page, and those links stop it being a dead end.
Name services as a buyer would say them. "Printer repair for schools" tells a school administrator they are in the right place. "Peripheral lifecycle solutions" tells nobody anything.
An IT hardware and support firm in Kolkata
An invented example. A firm in Kolkata sells laptops and servers, installs CCTV and structured cabling, runs annual maintenance contracts and repairs printers. That makes thirty services in all. Its menu mirrors the company: Sales, Networking, Surveillance, AMC, Repairs, Projects and Rentals. A school administrator whose office printers have stopped looks at the menu and cannot tell whether "AMC" or "Repairs" covers the problem.
The firm runs the card exercise with a past customer, a friend who manages a nursing home, and a cousin who has never hired anyone. The piles come back named "Things that have stopped working", "Setting up a new office", "Keeping an eye on the place" and "Buying equipment". Printer repair lands under the first. Annual contracts sit under the first for two sorters and under "new office" for the third, so one page is linked from both groups.
The old team names vanish from the front of the site. The school administrator now taps "Things that have stopped working" and finds printer repair in the first row. The firm keeps "AMC" as a word inside that page, because buyers do search for it. Not everything is solved: rentals fit no pile, so they stay as a link in the footer, and the firm has to write twelve short group and service descriptions before the new menu can go live.
What to do about old addresses
If the site already exists, list every current address before you change anything. Decide for each where it goes in the new structure, and have your developer redirect old addresses to new ones. Skipping this loses the links others have given you, from directories and past customers.
Do not rename services to be clever. A service with a dull name that people search for beats a bright name that nobody has heard of. The post on service pages and blog articles explains which content belongs where, and planning content around customer questions helps fill the pages.
When not to restructure
If the site has ten services, a simple list on one page and a clear contact route will do. Elaborate structure for a small offer makes it harder to use. Restructure when buyers say they could not find something, or when your own staff send customers a link by hand because the menu will not.
Run the cards this week
Buy the cards, find the three people and photograph the piles. If the result surprises you, the structure is probably part of the problem. A menu is the front door to all your marketing, because every ad and listing lands on it. If you want the grouping done against your own enquiry records, see website strategy and information architecture, or tell us what you need.
