Sitemaps: What Are They and How Do They Work?

Sitemap graphic courtesy of Smartdraw.com.

If you found yourself deep in the stacks of a major library, how would you proceed? Would you wander at random or seek out the organizational principles of the environment? Search engines often drop you into the middle of a complex website.   If you find yourself in this position, a sitemap is a useful tool.   Web designers sometimes create sitemaps that provide an overview of organizational patterns.   Sitemaps provide a visual reference to the terrain of a website.   Good sitemaps provide a visual summary that answers a disoriented searcher's essential questions: Where am I? What can I find here?   How to I get from place to place within this site?   

Learning the terrain helps you get the most from your visit. You can more quickly find what you are looking for by exploring in a structured manner. Map making is an ancient art. Designers have always tried to represent layers of information in a logical and accessible manner.   It is essential that a site visitor be able to navigate hyper-connected pages to quickly find what they are looking for.

Sitemap graphic courtesy of Smartdraw.com.

Sites are usually organized around a home page that is the intellectual starting place of a website.   From that first or home page, you can go in any direction.   Some sites adopt a linear organization.   Others use a scatter-plot approach. Sitemaps will vary based on the complexity of the information they represent. The top down chart design is the most common of all sitemaps.   Recently new research in information science has spawned new products that use multidimensional mapping techniques.   This type of sitemap can appeal to a wider range of learning styles, and convey more complex relationships than a simple top down arrangement.   Regardless of the style of presentation, learning to use a sitemap will more quickly orient you and save you time as you seek information on the web.

Types of sitemaps vary from flat hierarchical charts, to dynamic three-dimensional maps.   Sitemaps are also ‘clickable', acting as a navigational menu for the website.   A number of inventive and creative styles of sitemap are available on the web.   Indeed there are a number of software tools that help web designers create effective representations of information.

Authored by Dennis O'Connor 2003