SITEMAP

Design > Sitemapping : Navigation : Screen Resolution : Spliced Sites : Info Architecture : Site Standards : Storyboarding : Tables Intro : Frames Are Evil : Table Tips : Proportionate vs Absolute : View Source : Consistency

~ design ~

Hopefully you've read all the previous chapters and aren't just starting here ;)

So, you know what you (or your client) wants and you're ready to start designing the site? First of all, get a pen and paper. Yes, we'll need bits of dead tree to get through this stage - although I've designed many a site on the back of an envelope or beer coaster at the pub, so whatever you have at hand will probably do for a start.

You need to condense and organise all of the content you've collected into logical categories. This will form the basis of your site structure. Sometimes the categories map neatly into a standard site structure, especially if you're a heavy web user as then you're used to seeing particular categories. In other cases though, especially when dealing with clients, this isn't the case. They may have organised their content based on their business structure or organisational chart, for example. You'll need to beat that out of them! Their customers probably don't care about that stuff, although perhaps you could include it in an About Us page if they really want it on the site. The structure should be based on what the visitor's after. Keep asking yourself "Why are they here and what are they looking for? And how can I give it to them quickly and efficiently?"

One of the ultimate goals of good web design is Click Minimisation. Your visitors should be able to find what they need with the minimum number of clicks. This can be quite a challenge to a web developer, especially when there's a large amount of content and you don't have functions such as "search" that require more complex programming or server-based functionality. It's your job to find a balance in the complexity of the navigaton - unless it's a very small site, you're unlikely to be able to fit a link to every page into your navigation bar.

I usually try to alleviate this dilemma to some extent by putting my Sitemap on the actual site. After all, in order to keep my house in order, I need to have an up-to-date Sitemap at all times, so why not keep it on the site so that everyone can use it? This means that if someone knows what they're looking for, they use the Sitemap and then go straight to the page that they're after in just 2 clicks.

I usually aim for no more than 7 to 10 main (Primary) navigational categories and then have subcategories (Secondary) within these. I usually have all the Primary categories accessible throughout the site, and the Secondary categories within the current Primary category also accessible. For example, from this page you can get to the main page for every chapter of this site (on the left) and also to all of the pages within this chapter (at the top).