Your Website Might Be Organized Like an Overstuffed Pantry

A lot of businesses have great ideas, great offers, and great content, but they keep adding to their website without stopping to ask a very basic question.

What is it actually like to be here?

Not as the founder. Not as the marketer. Not as the person who already knows where everything lives. I mean as a first-time visitor, or even a returning one, trying to figure out where to go, what matters, and what to do next.

That is where things often start to break down.

People forget the goal of the website to begin with. What is the purpose? Where do you want people to go? What are your biggest levers to conversion, whether you are collecting email addresses, selling products, booking calls, or simply trying to get someone to take the next step?

The experience matters. It can absolutely make or break growth, and in some cases, reputation too.

There are a lot of things that go into maintaining a healthy website. Links should work. Buttons should work. Forms should give clear feedback so people know their information went through. Images and videos should be optimized so they do not take over the screen. Pop-ups should have an obvious way to close them. Page load time should not feel like dial-up internet.

All of that matters.

But today, I want to talk about organization.

Think about opening your pantry and finding soup, pasta, spices, snacks, and condiments all mixed together with no visible structure. You are hungry and just want to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but now you have to move things around, scan every shelf, and dig through items that have nothing to do with what you came for. At some point, you are even more frustrated than when you started and half the time you forget what you opened the cupboard for in the first place.

That can be your website.

Someone may have clicked an ad. Or maybe, lucky for you, you showed up in search for something they were already looking for. They land on your site, ready to take action, and instead they are met with a pantry of unrelated options, old content, too many categories, and no clear sense of where to begin. At that point, they may leave and never come back.

That is missed opportunity, and most of the time it is completely avoidable.

I have a friend who owns a successful business in Tampa. Years ago, he had a vision to help small business owners and entrepreneurs access free and paid resources that are often out of reach. I loved the vision because starting a business has so many layers, and it can get complicated fast when you are trying to figure it out with little money and even less guidance. His idea was to build the Expedia for entrepreneurs. One place where people could find the tools, services, and knowledge they needed to get set up, grow, and run a business.

The website has been online for about a decade. Over the years it grew. New content was added. More writers contributed. New services and affiliate relationships were introduced. Different designers and developers made updates along the way. Like a lot of long-running websites, it became something that had evolved over time without anyone really stepping back to look at the whole thing through fresh eyes.

Recently he asked for my thoughts on a new category he was adding to the site and whether the color choice aligned with the brand. I said sure, let me take a look. I had not visited the site in years.

The moment I logged on, I felt overwhelmed.

There were so many options, so many pages, and so many genuinely helpful tools buried among so many other things that I had to slow myself down and go page by page just to understand what was there. At one point I thought, this is going to take a lifetime.

So I started doing what I usually do. I made a list. Free content. Paid services. Affiliate tools. Expert help. Educational resources. I looked for calls to action. I asked myself what I would do if I were a first-time visitor. Where would I click first? What would I think this business actually wanted me to do? What path would feel the most obvious?

That is where AI became useful.

I remembered our early conversations about his original vision, the Expedia for entrepreneurs. That became the anchor. From there, I created a document outlining how I felt the site could be better organized. The spices, the canned goods, the condiments, the snacks. The snacks, in this case, were the calls to action. If someone is hungry, they should be able to grab what they need quickly. They should not have to dig through ten unrelated things to get there.

I mapped out the website and used Claude to help me turn those ideas into a visual structure. I wanted my feedback to be more than just a written critique. I wanted to show what the experience could feel like if it were reorganized with a human in mind. I set up a repository on GitHub, uploaded simple HTML examples, and shared links so he could actually click through and experience the proposed structure.

He was blown away.

And that is really the point.

A human did the thinking because a human is the one visiting the site after all. But AI helped me move much faster. It helped me turn weeks of manual planning into something visual, structured, and easier to understand.

That, to me, is one of the smartest ways to use AI in website work.

Not to replace judgment. Not to spit out generic copy. But to help you organize, map, test, and rethink a website experience before another visitor gets lost in it.

When it comes to making structural, brand, or conversion changes to a website, the human experience has to come first. There are a lot of great tools that can help you better understand where improvements need to be made: heatmaps, analytics platforms, SEO tools, session recordings. Sometimes it is also as simple as asking a friend, a customer, or a prospective client for honest feedback. Even a short survey can reveal things you no longer see because you are too close to the site.

The biggest takeaway is that user experience needs to be revisited more often than most people think. Especially when a site keeps growing.

Because the more you add without organizing where it belongs, the more likely your website becomes a pantry full of useful things that no one can find.

If your website has grown over time and started to feel messy, AI can be incredibly helpful in creating structure before you start redesigning pages at random.

Ask yourself:

Use AI to help categorize every page, offer, resource, tool, and CTA into buckets like:

This is where it gets useful. AI can help flag:

Instead of only writing notes, use AI to help generate a proposed sitemap, wireframe outline, or page hierarchy. That way the conversation becomes easier for other people to understand.

Before making major changes, ask:

Then compare what they do with what you expected them to do.

Want more practical shortcuts like this?
Explore my curated library of AI tools, prompts, and workflows at resources.taneilcurrie.com