When you are creating a web site, the first thing you need is a site map. This is the plan for the pages, how they connect with each other and how you arrange your information to lead your visitor through the site.
With a basic web site it’s pretty straight forward – home page with main pages on the menu for About us, Contact us, Services/products and maybe Case studies or testimonials. Sub pages from the Services/products page with more in depth details on specific services or product ranges.
Bigger websites are more of a challenge – they are more complex, more pages with many routes through the site so that the visitor can always find what they want easily from several different entry points. However, without the site map the developer can grow something that looks like the worst kind of bindweed leading the visitor up dead ends and wandering aimlessly until they leave the site in frustration.
So who creates the site map? The web designer? The web developer? The search engine specialist? The copy writer? No – you should, it’s your web site!
By all means get some advice from the specialists, but try and see it from the user’s point of view. Where would YOU want to go next if it was someone else’s website? What would you want to know (and what would you not need to know)?
Keep it simple and straightforward and think about the user – then ask a few business friends or networking contacts to get some feedback on the journey they will take if they visit. It’s an invaluable piece of research and it wlll help your site to be ’sticky’ when it’s up and running.
Posted by lesleywriter 