We’ve probably all visited a site that was hard to navigate. You got down into the categories and mini-categories and couldn’t find your way back up to other categories…quite frustrating.
As site designers, we may think our site does not need any sort of overarching structure, but that’s where our intimate knowledge of our creation does us no good. We have to remember that our site must be navigable to those who do not know its ins and outs, all its nuanced pages. An easily-navigable site is a user-friendly site.
What’s one way we can make users’ lives a lot easier? By building a sitemap–one page that lists all the site’s individual pages, organized by whatever system makes the most sense for your site (monthly archives, categorical archives, etc.).
Why Make a Sitemap?
Sitemaps are beautiful things–they make it easier for users to:
- Browse your site
- Find single pages without having to click through navigation every time
- Know at a glance all the pages you have on your site (this can be very helpful for you, too!)
To Make a Sitemap:
- Go to your site’s directory, OR visit your live website.
- Write down all the filenames for your content files, OR copy and paste each address from the address bar as you visit each page of your site.
- Associate each page’s title with its filename.
Example: If you have a page called “aboutme.html,” but it’s called “Learn More about the Webmaster”, then you’d title it “Learn More about the Webmaster” instead of “aboutme.html”.
- Make all these addresses and titles into working links, and link to them all in one big list, organized by content type, category, month it was posted, or however else you choose. Just make sure it’s sorted!
- Format this sitemap into a table (yes, a table–this is tabular data, after all), with headings and subheadings to show users clearly which sections are which in your sitemap. See examples of formatting a sitemap in the next section.
And you’re done! All you’ll need to do at this point is upload it, and every time you add a page, delete a page, or edit a title, edit the sitemap as necessary.
Some Examples of Sitemaps
The following pictures show some of the sitemaps I’ve created for my sites:
This is for Skies over Atlas, my City of Heroes site–as such, it is sorted by content category rather than by post date or by length of article, so that people can navigate to what they want to learn about quickly and easily.
This one is for The Gamer’s Repose, my gaming site, and it is sorted by game name and content type.
For my main site, WithinMyWorld.org, I didn’t need to sort it by content category so much since I had a lot of single pages that stood alone. So I just divided it up into “single pages” and “sections,” and then further delineated from there.
Automatic Sitemap Creators
Since my sites are small, making sitemaps manually is not much of a problem for me. But if you’ve got too large or too dynamic a site to do the manual sitemap (or you don’t want to be bothered with keeping it updated all the time), you can also use some of the following automatic sitemap generators, listed below:
XML-Sitemaps.com (need Google Webmaster account)
Codeplex.com’s Sitemap Generator (is software that needs to be uploaded to your server)
Doing an Automatic Sitemap in WordPress: Tutorial
BuildASiteBookmarks.com’s Sitemap Generator
Summary
To keep users of our websites happy, a sitemap can be just the thing to pull all of our content together in one place, where it’s easy to find that one page they’re looking for. It’s one way we can make browsing our sites easier, which means repeat visitors for us and a positive browsing experience for users. A true win-win!