Before building a website, it’s important to plan and organize the content before moving into the actual design and development phase. For these early stages, web designers work with clients to create sitemaps and wireframes to give a general overview of what to expect before actually building the website itself. Think of it as a blueprint.
To start the process, a site map is created to get an idea of what pages will be included on the website. This can start out as simple as a bulleted list, showing which items are in the main navigation, items that are tucked in dropdown menu, and other internal pages. Once the list of pages is established, a diagram is created to show the workflow of how pages are linked together and how a user is expected to move through them. Depending on how big or small your website is, this can begin to look a bit overwhelming. Still, it is important for developers to understand the architecture of your website before the development phase. To continue our analogy of building a house, a sitemap would be similar to a list of rooms to be included in a floor plan. Let’s say you want two bathrooms, four bedrooms, and an open kitchen/dining area. Just simply knowing that information gives you a better idea of where the rooms will go when creating a more detailed blueprint. Below is an example of a site map we created for a client website.