Why a Sitemap is Important

People often have a hard time thinking structurally or ‘meta’. (The word ‘meta’ means ‘about’ and to think ‘meta’ means to think ‘about’ something.) Your sitemap is a ‘meta’ representation of your entire website -- a zoomed out, 10,000 foot, birds-eye view. And having this perspective allows you to see the forest for the trees throughout the project.

What is a Website Sitemap?

A website is nothing more than a series of web pages on the web. Your sitemap gives these pages priority, context, and structure. 
   

Priority

Not all pages of your website are equally important. Your sitemap allows you to prioritize pages that are more important than others, as well as which pages a user will see first or most frequently.

Context 

Not every website visitor arrives directly on your homepage. Your sitemap helps them to quickly identify where they are in relation to the rest of the website.

Structure

The purpose of a website is to get a visitor from point A to point B. Your sitemap allows the visitor to see exactly where they are and where they want to go.

  How to create a website sitemap

Step 1

Find a tool to organize your sitemap. I recommend using an excel spreadsheet.

Step 2

List out ALL the pages you think you will want on your website. This includes pages you might not need. Just get them all out there and you can pare them down later.

Step 3

Don’t reinvent the wheel. You can look at your competitors and see what pages they have on their site and add any that look good to your spreadsheet.

Step 4

Organize the TOP LEVEL first. These are the main navigation links that you see on the top menu bar of the website. You don’t want more than five to seven of these. You can organize by grouping the pages you have into categories. For example, if you have the following pages: Team, Company History, Giving Back and Philosophy, you could group these all under ‘About’. 

Step 5

Once you have the top-level penciled out, move the other pages beneath them, otherwise known as your SECOND LEVEL. I recommend that websites with 25 pages and under only have two levels and that most websites should have no more than three levels of navigation.

  Sitemap Best Practices

Here are best practices when it comes to creating a sitemap:

• Five to seven links max for the main navigation menu
• No more than two to three levels of navigation 
• Every page on the site should be reached within three clicks
• Use easily recognized terminology when naming navigation links

How a sitemap impacts your project’s scope (and budget)

The larger the sitemap, the more it will impact your project’s scope and budget. People often don’t consider the implications of having a larger sitemap but it does impact things like SEO, finding imagery, content writing, editing, project management, among other things. Each new page requires additional resources, many of which you might not have considered. 

  How a sitemap impacts the users coming to your site

In the book The Paradox of Choice, the author cites a famous experiment where customers at a supermarket bought less jam when they were given more choices to choose from. Increasing your website sitemap can also dilute the impact of each page. You want your website to help visitors not confuse them. So, you must be very careful when selecting the number of pages to have on the site.

  How a sitemap impacts your design

Your sitemap will have a huge impact on the design of your website. Think about Craigslist and Amazon. You can feel how massive their website is based on the sprawling site maps and need to accommodate all the links. This greatly impacts the design. 

  How a sitemap impacts your timeline

Larger sitemaps add complexity. There are many ‘unknown unknowns’ that emerge with larger sitemap projects and these unknowns typically impact a website timeline geometrically.
 

Conclusion

I strongly advise you work on your sitemap first. Try to have an understanding of the number of pages you want as well as the structure. This will save you a ton of time and energy on your next website project.
 
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