Site Map Template
- Activity Time
- Varies
- Materials
- Sketch or Site Map Building Tool
- Participants
- IA Lead
A site map is a standard piece of IA documentation that needs to be created for any website project if the way content is getting organized is being rethought as part of the project. There are a lot of different ways to visualize a site map. We have included 5 example site map templates in a Sketch file format, ranging from a very small site to a very large site.
If you anticipate many iterations on your site map, are working on a very large site (1,000+ pages), or if you need to allow for your client to edit/comment on the sitemap, we recommend using a sitemap tool because of how much time you can save. We like using SlickPlan. The great thing about SlickPlan is that you have a lot of tools to annotate and tag your page content with minimal effort and the drag-and-drop functionality makes it very easy to move things around if they need to change, unlike a Sketch file! SlickPlan also has version control so you can easily keep track of previous site map iterations.
What information do you need to capture as part of the site map? Some common pieces of information that are useful to capture in a site map:
- Page Title
- URL
- Page Description
- Page Template / Content Type
In addition to these site map templates, we have some related tools that we use to help us rethink how your content is organized (refer to Card Sorting) and some tools that help you evaluate whether or not your content has been reorganized in a way that is understandable by users (refer to Tree Testing).
