Circulation: why website navigation is a floor-plan problem
7 November 2026 / 3 min read
I trained as an architect, and my thesis project was a crematorium in Kolkata. It was a public building, and circulation was the most important thing in it. People had to move from one place to another without friction.
The plan had double rows of columns, spaces for egress, and places where a person could stop, breathe a little and then carry on. It was not a corridor. It was a journey.
I have come to think about websites the same way.
The same plan, in pixels
In a building, circulation is the route people take: entrance, lobby, corridors, stairs, the doors they choose. When it works, nobody notices. When it does not, people get lost, queue in the wrong place, or walk past the rooms you wanted them to see. Websites have circulation too, and almost nobody draws it.
The homepage is the lobby. It does not hold the work. Its job is to give a visitor options, a little respite, and a clear sense of where to go. A visitor should leave the lobby knowing what to do to find what they came for.
A big hero section is the place to stop and breathe. You look at the image, you take in the words, and nothing pushes you to act before you are ready. You scroll, you understand what is happening, and you move on in your own time.
A plan that gets it wrong
I see this most on e-commerce sites. One online football jersey store in India is a good example. I wanted this year's Germany national team shirt. I could not go straight to it. I had to open Retro, then Country, then choose the country, and only then did I know where to go.
That is three menu steps for something a search bar would do in one. In building terms, it is a lobby with no signage, and a guest sent down three corridors to find a room they asked for by name.
The rule we use
On every navigation we design, a visitor should reach any page in three clicks or fewer. If it takes more, either the navigation is wrong or there are too many steps. Reducing the effort a person has to make is almost always the right call.
Redraw your site as a plan
Try this. On paper, draw your homepage as the entrance. Draw every other page as a room and every link as a door. Then trace the route a stranger takes from arrival to enquiry and count the doors.
Look for three things:
Rooms with no exit, such as a case study that ends without pointing anywhere
Important rooms three or four doors deep
Doors nobody uses, links on every page that take no one anywhere useful
Most sites reveal their real structure in about twenty minutes, and it is rarely the structure the navigation menu claims.
Our own plan
On bulbstudio.in the route to an enquiry is short. A Free audit button sits in the header and stays there on every page, so it is always within reach. There are clear calls to action leading to Book a call, which sits in the hero and is repeated across the site. Wherever you are, you know where to go next.
Coming next: sightlines, and what a visitor should see before they scroll.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on how people move through your site, start with a free website audit.
Related services: web design and digital platforms, mobile app and product design.
