Today’s research upon efficiency of user interaction with large web portals has established links between webpage popularity and crucial elements of webpage design, such as page layout and navigation on the portal, or, more narrowly, menu design. But despite their established importance, the two aforementioned elements of web design are next to never studied together, and their relative roles in rising webpage ranks are virtually unknown. In this paper, we assess pages with high betweenness centrality within the structure of 23 most popular university web portals, basing on indices for webpage usability (U-index) and portal navigation (N-index) developed and pre-tested separately on previous stages of our research. Our results show that classic patterns of web design, such as the F-pattern in page layout and two-frame menu structure, are characteristic for most of the sampled pages. Also, we show that the pages ranked high by betweenness centrality mostly have U-index close to 0.5, while their N-index is high. This combination ensures the leading positions of these pages within the portal graph.