What's Your Take on Sitemaps?

September 17, 2003 | 9 Comments

Somehow I lost the original entry for this. Anyway, I honestly have no clue how this came to be, but suddenly my main entry was replaced with a comment.

So, back to the original topic. I wanted to get your take on sitemaps. How do you use them? Do users find them useful? How are they best created and implemented? Where should they be located? Do you have any experience user testing them?

Answer how ever you feel. Sorry for the rough nature of this one, I just don’t have time to try and reconstruct this entry.

Filed under: Web General

Comments

1. Simon Willison said:

I think it depends on the size of the site. On a small site, a Site Map could be considered a “design smell” (a subtle indication that something is wrong) - small sites should usually be able to fit everythign in to their navigation in such a way that a Site Map is unnecessary. For huge sites, especially sites that must cover a wide range of topics (like a corporations web portal) they can help answer the question “just how big IS this site?” which for large sites often can’t be answered by navigation alone.

Posted on September 17, 2003 01:25 PM | #

2. John M. said:

I’ve never built a sitemap myself, isn’t there software that can do that in some automated fashion? I do use them quite often, on larger sites. Sometimes I’ll begin browsing the regular navigation, but if I can’t find what I want, and the sitemap is easily accessed, I’ll use that before I search. I find that searching doesn’t work all that well on many sites and all you get is garbage results. I think the sitemap should be in the footer and on any search pages. As well on an error page. I also think they should be very detailed, but not hard to read.

Posted on September 17, 2003 04:17 PM | #

3. Mark Trammell said:

The issue is one more of control than size, I think. If your site has a great deal of distributed content (hundreds or thousands of developers producing hundreds of thousands to millions of pages) without a central architectural scheme, site maps (or site listings, for that matter) can be a useful means to precurse search. If a central authority wrangles all of the content – no matter how much – it should be built into the primary/secondary/tertiary/… navigation. Anything else is obfuscating functionality.

Posted on September 17, 2003 08:33 PM | #

4. JB said:

1) Yes. I prepare sitemaps sometimes. It’s useful for visitors (big sites) and it’s useful for Google and the others.
3) Sometimes. It depends on type of user.
4) Link on every page.

Posted on September 17, 2003 11:19 PM | #

5. Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen said:

(1) I use SWISH-E for searching the main, old-tech site (one day the whole thing becomes blogs!). It’s so easy to filter SWISH-E’s output and turn it into a sitemap web page, I do it just because.

(2) I use them all the time, particularly when the website designers have been overly cutesy and I haven’t got time to figure out their mental map of the site.

(3) See (2) - I make the tiny bit of extra effort because I don’t believe I can see into the minds of every one of my site’s guests. The potential downside is, since I have a sitemap for visitors to fall back on, I needn’t worry so much about designing the information space. Second pitfall: my directory structure (which is what’s exposed in the sitemap) parallels the structure I offer in the site’s menus.

One might get some inspiration for alternative ways to present the information architecture of your website from Phillipe Kruchten’s 4 + 1 architecture views at http://www.rational.com/media/whitepapers/Pbk4p1.pdf, but I wouldn’t bank on real people actually finding that useful.

(4) I don’t know what’s best. Whatever it is, I suspect I’m not doing it. I have my sitemap accessible only from the very topmost page. It consists of directories and the files in those directories (except for the files I don’t want them to see, e.g., the pages I use to update my databases). It would probably be more useful to guests who are lost in the maze of menus (which I tried pretty hard not to make maze-y) to have access available on every page.

Posted on September 18, 2003 01:35 PM | #

6. website templates said:

Site maps are always good to have whether it is a big site or a small site. It really helps the users when they to find out the topic they are looking for is avaliable in the site or not, more over it helps the searchengine spiders to crawl your site easily and also linking strategy might give some internal PR boost interms of search engine ranking.

Regards
Martix

Posted on September 18, 2003 10:25 PM | #

7. Scrivs said:

I think sitemaps/indexes are extremely helpful for large sites because as has been mentioned, they offer a visual image of the structure of the site. They also offer an alternative way to navigate throughout the page. We all know most search engines on website are not as accurate as we would like and neither are the search queries that we input. However, sitemaps help to take the complexity out of some navigation on sites.

For smaller sites I would suggest building a sitemap, but not posting a link to it immediately. You can never be sure when your site is going to “blowup” and the number of pages or the architecture outgrows the current navigation. With a sitemap in place already, you can more easily come up with a newer and better navigation scheme for your site.

Posted on September 19, 2003 09:57 AM | #

8. christina said:

Chiara likes ‘em!
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/sitemaps_and_site_indexes_what_they_are_and_why_you_should_have_them.php

Posted on September 21, 2003 09:25 PM | #

9. Minz Meyer said:

I am using sitemaps even on smaller websites, regarding it more as a sort of extended table of contents. A quick sentence summarizing what the page is about, because sometimes the link topics of the main navigation aren’t self explaining (i.e. “about” - does it mean about the page, about the author, about everything??).
The link to the sitemap is part of my main navigation (which means it appears on every page of the site , placed somewhere between help, home, glossary and search…).
And btw, it is a perfect thing to use a definition list ;)

Posted on September 24, 2003 04:07 AM | #