What is sitemapping and why should I do it?
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2023-03-24T14:04:37+00:00
Sitemapping is a useful exercise for taking stock of your content and deciding how to organize it. Mechanically, sitemapping involves taking inventory of all of the content (or content types) you expect to have on your website. Once you create that inventory, you create a tree-style diagram showing the hierarchy of content.
A visual sitemap is a tool for understanding the hierarchy of pages and how different pieces of content relate to each other. When you’re creating a lot of new pages for your website, you also sometimes run the risk of making content that never gets linked to from other pages. Your sitemap will show you all of your content to ensure that no piece of information is an island with no connections to other pages. Additionally, a sitemap can help you get in the headspace of visitors to your site: what subpages may your user expect under an “about” page? If a user is looking for bibliography, where might they look?
Once you have a finished sitemap and content inventory, it becomes much easier to get a high-level view of the site. What information is the viewer going to encounter first? If information is far down the tree diagram, how can you find other ways of highlighting it? What information would a user even expect to be grouped together? In this module, we will help you answer some of those questions for your site.
