Being able to make a sitemap is a useful skill when creating a new website or adding new content to an existing website. To learn how to make a sitemap, keep reading or skip to one of the following sections:
- What is a sitemap?
- What is a sitemap? view of the site? ?
- Sample Sitemap
- Video Tutorial: How to Make a Sitemap
- Step by Step: How to Make a Sitemap
- Benefits of using a sitemap tool
- When to use a sitemap generator
In this tutorial, we are using Gliffy, an easy-to-use tool wear. use the site mapping tool. You can continue by starting a free trial of Gliffy Online, no credit card required.
What is a sitemap?
A sitemap is a list of the pages of your website. that search engines use to crawl you. They can be structured differently depending on who uses them or how they’re used, but technical sitemaps are often written in XML or HTML. This makes it easier for search engines or other programs to understand, which is important for SEO.
Other sitemaps use a different structure to ensure that web designers, writers, and their teammates they can easily understand the structure of a website they are working on.
What is a visual sitemap?
A visual sitemap is a hierarchical diagram that allows users quickly understand the structure and navigation of a website and, unlike its technical counterpart, no code is required.
When redesigning a website, creating a new website, or adding a lot of content to an existing website, it is helpful to make a visual site map to clearly communicate your ideas while collaborating with web developers, project managers , writers, and other teammates.
Making a visual sitemap can also be a useful first step when writing the technical sitemap or XML listing for your website.
Sample Sitemap
Whether you’re planning a new website or documenting what you’ve created, even a simple sitemap can be helpful. Take this simple website as an example:
An animalz.co sitemap in diagram form would look like this: (The home page is “Home” and its only category is “About”) .
In a list format, it would look like this:
Both are effective, but images tend to be easier to digest than words, especially if necessary. share your concept with someone else.
Video Tutorial: How to Make a Sitemap
Step by Step: How to Make a Sitemap
1 . Design your content ideas
The first step to making a fully functional sitemap is to design all of the content ideas for your website. At this stage, it’s okay to do a lot of brainstorming and think about all the things you might want to include on your site; you’ll have time to refine your ideas later.
In Gliffy, you can drag and drop a rectangle onto the editor page for each piece of content or category of content you want to include. You can then easily rearrange and rearrange them.
With all your ideas on the page, evaluate each one from your user’s perspective. How will each piece of content help the user or support your business? Start grouping your ideas into categories and subcategories, removing anything that isn’t compatible with your users as you go.
Also find places to combine your ideas. If you have two very similar ideas, could they both be supported on one page on your site?
2. Identify Categories and Subcategories for Your Site
Now is the time to consider how all of this content will look to a new visitor to your site. Using the groups you began to gather in Step 1, identify the main categories and organize the content below them.
This is also a good time to enter a key or legend to keep your map organized. place. For example, your home page can be a circle and each category can be a square.
3. Add content and data to the high-level structure
Clearly label each category and start adding more data to each element. Adding your page URL is a great way to start structuring the technical elements of your site on the fly.
You can also add annotations for details like which pages you intend to use for marketing, which pages will include video content, or which pages will require a form for the user to access.
This is also a good time to build and define your legend. For example, a different color or dotted lines could indicate content you want to add later.
An example of what a draft sitemap might look like for a product launch.
4. Refine Your Sitemap
You should have a pretty useful diagram at this point, so it’s time to put it to the test. Here are some exercises that can help you make sure you’re hitting your goal with this sitemap.
Make mock user journeys
Take any user profiles you have and ask yourself how these people would browse the site. Create questions that customers may have and plan how they would find the answer to that question.What are the sticking points? Where would it be difficult for them to know what to do? These are places you might need to rearrange.
Get a Second Opinion
Give your sitemap to a friend or teammate who isn’t involved in your project. Ask them to find which pages would have the answers to the questions about their project. If they’re not sure where to find something, that’s your cue to make some changes.
Double check the details
Make sure all information is consistent and clear on your diagram . Are all page titles in bold? Do all pages have a URL that follows the best practices for SEO? Do you constantly follow your legend? Being consistent throughout your sitemap makes it easier to read and use.
5. Share the Sitemap
Beyond creating an organizational plan for your project, having a sample sitemap for what you want to build can help your team collaborate. Share the sitemap with your web designers, writers, freelancers, and leadership team so everyone has a clear idea of what you’re going to do.
When you use a sitemap tool like Gliffy, you can share a link directly to your sitemap via a tool like Slack or Trello, you can embed your diagram on your team’s wiki via from our Confluence integration, or you can add a diagram to a Jira with our Jira diagrams app.
Benefits of using a site mapping tool
1. Use a sitemap to plan content
Designing all the pages of your website in advance ensures that you’re considering each piece of content before you start building work. This step includes the research, writing, imagery, overall design, and all the other elements needed to create a great website.
2. Create a sitemap to improve the user experience
With sitemaps, you can easily visualize the user journey. Look for dead ends in your content, opportunities to add links between pages, and make sure there are no unexpected next-click experiences. Having a clear sitemap can also help your writers consider user experience while building pages and adding CTA buttons or links.
3. Optimize Your Site for Specific Goals
One of the most important questions to answer when planning a website is what do I want visitors to walk away with and how does that help my business? By designing what you want to put on your website and how you’ll direct users to it, sitemaps help you keep your business goals on track.
When to use a sitemap Builder
The above steps may not work if you are planning to redesign a large site with hundreds of pages, URLs, and paths. Don’t worry. If this is the case for you, your first step is to use a sitemap generator to get the bones of your website. There are a variety of tools that will be able to process a list of your pages automatically.
Take Gliffy’s old website for example. A quick sitemap of our website finds ~490 pages!
A screenshot of Gliffy’s sitemap reveals pages differentiated by the tag.
But are all these pages necessary? ? One way to find out is to go through your sitemap with a fine-toothed comb and remove anything irrelevant. Do you have some floating pages hanging around, like an old version of “About Me” before you posted the new one? Find and remove them, then rerun your site through a builder.
In this case, focus the sitemap you create on highly used categories to understand and visualize your sitemap. website. . For example, Gliffy’s website has many pages on our “Blog”. So instead of trying to make an overwhelming sitemap like this:
You can display this, filling in the categories you like the most or the tags associated with your blog content.
When you have a page-heavy site, you can also choose to redesign and map your site one category at a time.
The truth is, sitemaps can become unwieldy and overwhelming if your site is too big. Removing stale pages and using categorical organization will help you better manipulate the data on your site.
Use a sitemap to build websites that work
Sitemaps help you they help create websites that work because they are just that: maps. They provide a blueprint from which you can build and instructions for everyone involved in the project.
By taking the time to plan and optimize a sitemap, you are helping your business create a website that it will really work. for users and get closer to your business objectives. Gliffy offers design tools that are perfect for sitemap display, plus a free trial so you can get started today.
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