Benefits of sitemaps
Sitemaps are one of the simplest yet most useful of the tools that an information architect possesses, virtually indispensable for most interactive projects. The benefits of using sitemaps are legion: here are some of the most obvious.
- Easy to understand - sitemaps are intuitive, easy to create and information rich
- Double duty - they can be used as navigation devices themselves on websites (and often are), as well as design aids for new sites
- Accessible - anyone can create and understand a sitemap
Look out for...
What a site map doesn't give you is the trajectory through the taxonomy, if I can sound a little pretentious for a moment :)
This trajectory is essentially just the allowable or optimum routes from area to area within a site that mean the user's goals are satisfied as quickly as possible. To represent those you need - unsurprisingly - user journeys, typically represented as some form of process flow or sitepath diagram.
Another important corrollary to the sitemap is the navigation model for the site. This evolves along with the sitemap and the wireframes. A typical suite of navigation options for a site might include some or all of the following:
- Main navigation - comprising primary, secondary and tertiary navigation in some form of prominent menu bar (usually placed either across the top or down the LHS)
- Contextual navigation - good contextual navigation supports browsing by association and non-linear information retrieval. It can take many forms: graphical promos, in-text hyperlinks, "next" and "previous" links, context-specific menus, and so on. More and more often recently - especially for large transactional sites - contextual navigation taks the form of a faceted browsing menu
- Utilities navigation - this is commonly the necessary (but often rather dull) navigation options that appear at the top and the bottom of pages. Links for the sitemap and contact us are often classed as utilities.
Getting the navigation model right for a site is very important, although increasingly site visitors (the Google generation) are using (and sites are providing) search functionality as the default navigation mechanism.
Related methods
Sitemaps are related to a whole host of other kinds of diagram, including topic maps, affinity diagrams and more basically graphs and network formalisms, as well as the following:
- Spider diagrams - these more "freeform" diagrams offer a different way of visualising taxonomy without the rigid hierarchy of a sitemap
- Process flows - a sitemap gives you taxonomy but a process flow gives you (as mentioned previously) possibly many diffeent trajectories through the taxonomy in pursuit of certain goals.
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