The menu after the ABP turn: five entries, one product first, and eleven pages out of the nav

Date: 2026-09-18 · Author: @website-agent
Trigger: the project lead, on the home page carrying two menus — "I don't think we need that menu / Also can you suggest a refactoring of the top menu and pages (for example we don't need the Lisbon link any more)"
Reads against: site/pages.json at v1.25.3 (69 entries, 34 of them in the menu, 7 top-level); the editorial inbound-link count for every listed page, computed from the deployed tree; the synthetic-user study, which walked five readers through the site twice

1. What is there now, and what it costs

Seven top-level entries, which is the cap the header can hold at 1100px: Policies (5) · Who it's for (3) · Insurance (8) · Live demos (7) · Lisbon 2026 (1) · Pricing (1) · More (11).

The menu is the artefact of a site that argued for insurability first and only started selling Agent Behaviour Policies later. Counted rather than asserted — inbound links from the body of other pages, ignoring the menu itself:

Eleven listed pages are reachable only through the menu. That is not an argument for deleting them — several are good, and one, grant-gap.html, is squarely product material filed under Insurance. It is an argument that the menu is carrying the site's history rather than its shape.

Two further specifics:

• Two entries are called almost the same thing. Agent Behaviour Policy (abp.html) and *Agent

  Behaviour Policies* (agent-behaviour-policy.html) sit four rows apart in the same group. A reader cannot tell which is the explanation and which is the sixteen examples.

• Lisbon 2026 was 17–18 September 2026. It is a dated record from today onwards, not a

  destination.

2. What unlisting actually does

unlisted: true in site/pages.json removes a page from the menu and nothing else: generate.mjs filters unlisted only when it builds the menu data, so the page keeps its URL, its markdown twin, its place in sitemap.xml and llms.txt, and stays indexable. private: true is the different thing — no twin, noindex, disallowed in robots.txt. Every proposal below unlists; none deletes and none makes anything private.

3. The proposal: five entries, product first

That is five top-level entries and 19 pages in the menu, from seven and 34. Eleven pages leave the nav and none leaves the site.

Labels to settle, because they are the reader-facing half of this: Behaviour policies rather than Policies (on this site policy is also the insurance instrument, and the study measured two readers taking the bare word for insurance). Under it, What an ABP is for abp.html and The sixteen examples for agent-behaviour-policy.html, which is the distinction the current pair hides.

4. Two alternatives, for the record

B — the partner's shape, four entries. Behaviour policies · Pricing · Who it's for · More, with Insurance demoted to a single page inside More. It matches the home page the partner designed and is the most honest description of what is for sale today. It also buries the make your agents insurable argument, which is the positioning the lead has been clear is worth keeping.

C — prune only. Keep the seven groups; drop Lisbon, split the two ABP labels, collapse the demos to one entry, and cut More from eleven to six. Half an hour of work, no information-architecture decision, and the Insurance group still carries eight pages in front of a reader who came to buy.

5. Done already, because it was asked for directly

• The home page's second menu is gone. The partner's design carried its own in-page anchor strip

  with a Buy button in it, so under the shared menu the page had two navigation bars and the buy action twice above the fold. The strip and its CSS are removed; the hero and the closing panel still carry Buy an Agent Behaviour Policy, which is once at each end of a long page. The section ids stay, so briefs.html → index.html#parts still lands.

• Lisbon 2026 is unlisted. The page, the twin and the sitemap entry are untouched.

6. Built — A, on 18 September 2026

The lead picked A, and it shipped in v1.26.0. Five top-level entries, 21 pages in the menu, 13 pages out of it and none deleted. Two departures from §3 as written, both because the counted inbound links said so:

• Give feedback stays in the menu. It is linked from nothing but 404.html, so unlisting it

  would have orphaned a page that invites a reader to write to us.

• The three Insurance essays got a home before they lost their menu row. insurance.html now

  carries Three pages this argument is built on — acceptable.html, acceptance.html and statics.html as three named links, above the FAQ. That was §6's open question, decided the way it was decided because two of the three had no editorial inbound link at all.

The rest went as written: grant-gap.html moved into the product group, the two look-alike labels became The sixteen examples and What an ABP is, the six demo pages come off the menu and are reached from demos.html, which links every one of them, and the operational pages — the brief register, Working with us, After payment and the synthetic-user study — are reached from the console, which already linked all four.

Measured after: the header is 1,076px of content inside its 1,100px cap, the mobile drawer holds all five groups without scrolling sideways, and sitemap.xml still lists 68 pages.

7. The question §3 left open, and how it was answered

Whether the essays under Insurance — Accepted is not acceptable, You own the risk, Static scenarios — belong in a reading list on insurance.html or in the Library. Both work; the Library is the honest place for writing that is not selling anything, and insurance.html is where somebody following the argument already is. It was the lead's call and it was made: A, with the essays on insurance.html rather than in the Library.