Sitemap design: how to design a sitemap for a website easily

Before you begin designing a sitemap, it's key to think about what info you want to deliver to your website users. Start by listing some goals you want to achieve with your website such as sales, blog readership, trial signups, etc. This will all come together to shape the information architecture that'll hone your sitemap and ultimately inform the content you provide to help lead users where you want them to go – your solutions.

It's important to determine who's responsible for the design of the sitemap, who's contributing to it and who will manage approvals. Although it's useful to get input from clients or stakeholders, it's better to limit input to 1-3 critical team members for the sitemap creation process.

You don't want to have too many cooks in the kitchen.

Start designing your sitemap with a home page as the root. Next, begin to design sitemap pages that outline your main navigation which should live directly beneath the home page on the second level. These pages typically include common topics like “About Us” and “Contact” that are often one click from the main navigation or home page.

You really want to think deeply about every aspect of the user journey while you design your sitemap, so remember to include utility pages like “Privacy Policy”.

Consider how you want to organize your subject matter from the user's perspective, so people don't spend excess time hunting to find relevant information.

On this second level, you should create pages that include general information or summaries of a given topic, think of parent pages as chapter headings in a book. All related content should be easy to find on child pages linked to and from the parent page. Parent pages should also contain sub-navigation or links to relevant content.

User friendly navigation normally includes 5-10 items; for more, consider consolidating content or creating additional webpages.

Add third-level (and sometimes even fourth-level) pages beneath your parent pages that contain the related content. In most cases child pages are reached by parent page links only.

These pages should be highly specific and focused on one main idea per page; picture it as a funnel with the content getting more refined and detailed as you go down.

For the majority of websites, the sitemap page design will only need three levels of page hierarchy but there are rare exceptions for sites with vast amounts of information, like government or education websites, in which 4-5 levels may be required.

To land on the best sitemap design for a website, we recommend you duplicate your sitemap and test a few different scenarios to help you visualize and determine the optimal site structure for your users. One which balances the need for unique pages and topics and maintains a shallow click-depth.

Think about other ways to group content; try organizing parent and child pages by user persona, product line, user industry, company size, etc. You may find that alternative groupings encourage users to follow content paths more relevant to their specific needs or demographics and lead to a more successful website.

Creating additional scenarios when website planning will also aid in your page layout (where a mockup tool helps tremendously) and silo architecture with the various scenarios allowing you to pinpoint the most visually appealing and designer friendly website structure.

Once your structure is defined, it's time to add descriptive information about your pages to the sitemap. Slickplan allows you to easily select a page type, identify what content you'll need and even assess the required level of coding for your sitemap designs. You also can add notes to each page; a summary of the on-page content as well as any special instructions, attachments or development concerns that need to be addressed. Pretty sweet.