This is a site map I did for a client’s product marketing website. Site map is important for these reasons:
- Guides the designer/marketing head/product manager to plan and organize the content or data and create a solid information architecture, before diving straight into website navigation
- When content is well-organized, it will then be a breeze for users to navigate through your site. The website could be described as similar to a shopping mall — if the layout is clear and good visual cues, then the customer will always know where to navigate to their next destination store (page).
- Gives a overall macro view of your website, so that anytime you wish to edit or add new content, the site map will always serve as a reference point. You can then easily scan through to know what is the existing, and pick out where to make changes to.
- It is also useful if there are many stakeholders for the website, the site map will then serve as a single source of truth for the company and provide a clear view.
- Helps the engineers building the site to understand the structure that the business units have in mind and how to construct the urls. E.g. a business built for the long term only has 1 product now, but might have product expansion plans in future. So instead of constructing as L1 category www.xxx.com/remit, it would be meaningful to create L2 categories instead, so the url would look like www.xxx.com/products/remit.
Just a few items I have off my head, if you have other thoughts about site map, feel free to share!
Till later~
