Your Website Sitemap
How you organise your information is essential if you want to help guide your visitors through a path on your site to the desired outcome. After following the information in this page, you should have a complete sitemap for your website.
What do do:
Take a piece of paper. In the top center, draw a square. Each square represents one page. In the first square, write the word home. (see picture 1 below)
How To Start - Organising your data
Staring at a blank piece of paper wondering what pages to put on your website is difficult. Most clients respond by visiting their competitors sites and copying the pages they like. The problem with this approach is that you are assuming your competitors have done a good job and you are not offering your visitors anything new.
A better way to start is to think about the paths you want your visitors to take through your site. You can do this by breaking organising your information in three different ways:
- Organise your information by services / products
- Organise your information by target markets
- Organise your information by visitor activity - more relevant to larget sites
If your products / services are designed to target separate markets, then two and three may be the same for your business.
In our case, we have one product designed to be used by different markets in several ways, so the logical choice was to organise our information by target markets. Ideally, you will end up with about three or four main categories.
Top level navigation
Now you have decided on how to organise your pages, you can start on the first row of your sitemap.
What to do:
On your piece of paper, on the row below your home square, draw a square for represent each of your groups. You may also want to include some other commong pages such as about us, or contact us. In each square, write a summary of the information you want to include. Draw a link from the home square to each new square. Draw a link from between each square to represent the fact that these pages are linked. (see picture 2 below)
Second level navigation
Think about the path you want your user to take when they reach this main page. Is the end result to fill in a quote form, pick up the telephone or make a purchase? What information will they need to make that decision?
What to do:
For each of the main pages, write a list of pages below each one. Include the page that has the required end result (e.g. free trial). On your main piece of paper, underneath each main page square, draw your new squares, write the name and summary of content, and draw a link from the main square. (See picture 3 below)
Remove Duplicates Pages
Next look for any duplicate pages. These are pages that apply to all your sections. In our site, the most common duplicate page is the free trial page. We do not want to create a separate page each time as this would be difficult to maintain if we ever decided to add in a new field or change the wording. Instead, we want to direct all the users to the same page
What to do:
Look through your site map for duplicate pages. At the bottom of your paper, draw a square for each duplicate. In the square, write the word 'duplicate', enter the name and summary of the page information. Now in your site map, wherever this page appears, put a cross through it and draw a line to your duplicate page. (See picture 4 below)
Summary
After reading through this page and following the 'what to do' sections, you should have a clearer idea as to how to organise your information and what type of pages you want to include.
These articles are part of the '10 steps to building a new website guide'. Move onto step 4 - How will you measure successs - or go directly to the main contents page.
Once you know what to change on your website,
the question becomes how...
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