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Site Mapping Main Menu

Sitemapping vs. Sitemaps

You may also be familiar with a sitemap as a file or page you can find on a website. Frequently, websites with large amounts of content will provide a page that lists off all of the content that can be found on that site. Some sitemaps are human-readable, meaning that they are meant to provide an inventory for a person to view and explore through the browser. One such example can be found on the College of Fine Arts website: https://cfa.fsu.edu/connect/site-map/

Machine-readable sitemaps are designed for webcrawlers and are written in XML. These types of sitemaps can be used by search engines to improve your search results, or they can be used by web archivists to automatically crawl and create backups of your site. One example of a machine-readable sitemap can be found on the FSU Special Collections blog: https://fsuspecialcollections.wordpress.com/sitemap.xml

If you want your site to be archived by us at some point, we recommend creating a machine-readable sitemap of your content (or sitemap.xml). Many platforms have sitemap.xml plugins, so please explore those, if you are so inclined!

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What is sitemapping and why should I do it?
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.