Once you’ve inventoried all of your content, you can start drawing it out into a tree diagram. You can do this with pen and paper, or you can use an online diagramming tool (we have a list of commonly-used ones). The goal of the sitemap is to map out hierarchical relationships between pages. Generally, the “root” (we’ll call it “level 0”) of the tree is going to be your homepage.
The next level of nodes (or “level 1”) will be the items you expect to have on your main menu for the site. Keep in mind that for most content management systems, the main menu (or this first level) will display on every page. To determine what pages should be on that main menu, think about what 3-5 pieces of content you always want accessible to your users. Usually, main menus contain an “about” and “contact” page, but that may not be the case for your project! If you have an “Updates” category page that will serve as a central hub for a lot of other important content, you will likely want to highlight that as a page on the main menu. Pages that don’t link out anywhere may also be appropriate for the main menu, especially if they convey important, high-level information about your project.
Anything on level 2 will be content that is linked to from a page listed in the main menu. This relationship between main menu pages and secondary content can be accomplished in many ways, such as: dropdown menus, secondary sidebar menus that only occur on specific pages, hyperlinks on the page, etc.
You can continue creating levels of content (e.g. “level 3” would be composed of content linked in some way on level 2), but keep in mind that the more layers of content, the harder it will be for a user to access that piece of information. Generally, it’s a good practice to keep your content at two levels, with maybe the occasional third-level page. You want to make sure your content doesn’t get lost in a sea of clicks.
In addition to having explicit hierarchical links, you can also use a different arrow style to show when content connects across a hierarchy (I like using arrows with dotted lines). This will allow you to see when pages connect to each other and appear in different levels of the hierarchy. It’s generally a good idea to have important content linked from multiple places if it won’t be linked on your main menu. These secondary links can show you how often a given page will appear as a user clicks through your site.
Once your sitemap is drawn out, you can get a sense of the most important pages. This will help you prioritize what to create first, but it will also help you think about how to highlight that content as you move towards thinking about site design.