Planning Your Website's Site Map

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Creating the basic structure, names, and organization of the pages of your website

Objectives and Goals

The first step of planning your website is the exercise of creating a site map. Working through what you want to include on your website can help you clarify goals and organize page content to support those goals.

Your website's site map will be unique to your business or organization, and should reflect a clear and organized presentation of your products and services to your visitors. Pages and functions on the site should be aligned with visitor's priorities in mind. Consider ways to make it as easy as possible to help them find and use the content on your website.

In addition, a site map which uses good information architecture helps search engines understand what your site is about in order to provide well-matched search results.

These objectives and goals can be accomplished by:

Using descriptive, yet short page names.
Organizing pages in groups, using major themes (top level pages).
Using sub-pages to create sub-categories under these major themes (secondary pages).
Using additional sub-pages to provide more details as needed (third+ level pages).
Avoiding redundancies or duplicate information.
Getting feedback from others outside your planning group who fit your target audience profile

Creating a Site Map

A tree is good visual illustration to help you understand what a site map will look like. The trunk, the base of the tree, is the home page. A tree's major branches which extend off the trunk represent the top level pages (main horizontal menu). These major branches have smaller limbs extending off of them which represent the second, third, fourth, etc. levels pages (shown in the drop down menu).

See an example of the site map for this website