Note · Website design
Navigation is a claim about why you are here
The short answer
Navigation is not a list of the pages you have, it is a claim about what a visitor came to do. Six equally weighted links make six claims at once, which on a phone becomes a stack of options above the headline and on any screen becomes a page that cannot tell you where you are. Four destinations, one of them visibly current, does more work than six that are all the same size.
If it cannot say where you are, it has a state bug
A person who lands from search does not know your structure. Without a current-page state, every link looks equally unvisited and the page gives no orientation at all. This reads as a styling omission and is really a missing state, the same category of defect as a form that does not say which field failed.
Colour alone is not a state
Marking the current page only by tinting it hands nothing to someone who does not distinguish that colour, and very little to anyone on a bright screen outdoors. A state needs a second channel: a rule under the word, a weight change, a shape. And it needs the machine-readable version too, so a screen reader announces the same fact the eye is getting.
The thumb is at the bottom
A row of destinations pinned to the top of a phone screen is the furthest point from the hand holding it. Moving destinations to the bottom is not a trend; it is where the thumb already is. Whatever you pin there has to reserve its own height, or it sits on top of the end of every page, which is exactly where the last call to action lives.
Secondary is a real category
Not everything deserves the top level, and pretending otherwise is how you get six. A disclosure that holds the secondary destinations keeps them reachable without giving them the same voice. Build it with a native disclosure element so it works before any script runs, then let script add only what the element cannot do on its own, like closing when someone clicks elsewhere.
Test it by asking a stranger to land in the middle
The homepage is the least interesting test of navigation, because that is the one page everybody designs for. Open an interior page cold, on a phone, and ask: what is this site, where am I, and what is the one thing I am supposed to do next. If the answer takes more than three seconds, the structure is doing the work the design should be doing.
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