- Designed a website design with a sophisticated user experience and interface that builds confidence instantly.
- Organized an architecture that makes it easy for people to find information they are looking for.
- Structured pages to not just tell a story but are easy to scan while following readability best practices.
- Put yourself in your customers shoes to understand the information they want and what will influence them.
- Incorporated conversions at each stage of the buying cycle to ensure the most results.
- Setup 301 redirects to ensure you don’t lose any search rank.
- Tested for Core Web Vitals to help boost search rankings.
This isn’t a website touting its own excellence — although the brand is at the top of its game. There’s no denying that — but it is aspect users are too familiar with. They know about the forward-thinking nature of the brand and its strive towards success.
But they don’t know how many seats come in a certain version or what safety features are included. So, the website clearly showcases this information for consumers to see, absorb and let sway.
No matter if you’re a stakeholder, designer or developer, the overarching goal is to captivate the end-user, i.e., anyone that interacts with your finalized website.
They may never say, “wow, love this sitemap” but they’ll imply it because site mapping can make it easier:
- For users to find your site
- For users to find content on your site
- To improve navigation on the site
- To ensure the best user experience
As mentioned above, an HTML sitemap is essentially a table of contents for your website. It tells users what to expect in terms of content and functionality, but it’s not the only type of sitemap that matters for users. Visual sitemaps are also useful as they help ensure that development teams stay user-focused rather than organization-focused, while XML sitemaps help potential visitors discover the site via search.
Site mapping for new websites
If you’re building a new website, there’s a good chance you’ll start out with some sort of sitemap even if you don’t quite realize it because we’re all natural planners to varying degrees. Just a rough sketch of the pages you’d like to create constitutes a basic sitemap.
Site mapping is about using research and information architecture to intelligently and comprehensively develop that plan further.
Site mapping a website is like an architect producing design drawings for a house – it gives everyone involved in the project a framework to follow and makes sure you don’t come up against any design snags.
Website mapping for redesigns
It’s more or less intuitive why you might use site mapping when starting from scratch to plan a new site, but it’s just as essential for redesigns. Consider why you’re doing the redesign in the first place, aesthetics are part of it but you also want to improve performance and site maps are crucial for that because they help you pinpoint what’s not working.
As with a brand spankin’ new site, redesigns need planning – perhaps more so because they are remakes of an original design that wasn’t working out for whatever reason.
Heaps of free info are at your disposal for redesigning an existing site, like analytics data. Use it!
Stakeholders and clients
Even though they may not actively build the website, stakeholders still have an important role in the planning process. A stakeholder, to be clear, is anyone with interest in your project and when it comes to building websites, there are likely a few. Stakeholders can include:
- Target audiences
- C-suite executives
- Project managers
- Sponsors
Each of these people has a viable stake in your website’s success. Their role may be internal – helping to build the site or realize organizational goals, or external – delivering clicks and making conversions. Whatever their specific job is with the website project, maintaining open communication with them is essential throughout the website planning process.
The end user
Who are you building for?
No matter if you’re a stakeholder, designer or developer, the overarching goal is to captivate the end-user, i.e., anyone that interacts with your finalized website.
They may never say, “wow, love this sitemap” but they’ll imply it because site mapping can make it easier:
- For users to find your site
- For users to find content on your site
- To improve navigation on the site
- To ensure the best user experience
As mentioned above, an HTML sitemap is essentially a table of contents for your website. It tells users what to expect in terms of content and functionality, but it’s not the only type of sitemap that matters for users.