Cutting 20-plus navigation menus down to one a student could use

Situation

A public university site grows the way most of them do: one department adds a page, then a menu, then a sub-menu, for twenty years, and nobody's responsible for the whole thing. By the time I got there, the site had grown past 5,000 pages and 20-plus separate navigation structures, and admissions alone was pulling more than a million views a year through a maze nobody had audited.

Approach

I led the content and information-architecture side of a site-wide redesign: deciding what to keep, merge, or cut across those navigation menus, building new content templates and landing pages, and designing custom iconography so the admissions section could be scanned instead of read line by line. Later, when the university rolled out two-factor authentication, I built and shipped the onboarding landing page that walked 20,000-plus users through it, and it didn't trigger a support ticket spike.

Outcome

Engagement rose 35% across the redesign. Twenty-plus menus became one structure people could actually navigate. I still think about that project every time a client asks me to "just add one more link" to a nav bar that already has twelve.

• 35% increase in engagement site-wide
• 5,000+ pages restructured
• 20+ navigation menus consolidated into one structure
• 2FA onboarding landing page shipped for 20,000+ users