Visual maps are incredibly helpful when planning anything, whether it be a website or a career path. When a director wants to make a film, they story-board the script by breaking it down into understandable chunks to help them plot the course of the themes of the film. When you want to create a website, drawing up a sitemap is just as useful, with the added bonus that you can use your work in the end product.

Initially, your Sitemap should be a flow chart which sets out a list of your main pages and sub-pages. This should help you to figure out how each page relates to another, and cut out any duplicate content links. Once your site is up and running, however, you can use a simplified version of your flow chart as your sitemap, enabling Search Engine Spiders to find the content you want them to see more quickly.

Planning through a sitemap is essential when you have a large website. For example, if you are running a web-based retail business selling cooking equipment. Your site will need products pages and a main page, but to make it attractive to your customers, you would also want to include some informative Content Writing like hints and tips. How do you locate each of these different sections?

Start out by asking the sort of questions your viewers are likely to ask. They won’t only want to see the products, they will want to be able to distinguish between types of product, eg. electronics, utensils, cutlery and crockery, baking, tools and cookbooks. They might want advice on what they should use or reviews of new products. They will want to know your business policies, such as refunds, payment and privacy. They might also like to know your company’s history.

These questions will mostly fit in with the pages you were already planning, but they might bring up some ideas you hadn’t thought of. You should be able to group the answers into logical categories which will fit into your pages and sub-pages: home, about us, news, policies, and products, which should split into sub-pages of cooking equipment, dining, cookbooks, etc. You should keep the names for your pages simple, but there may be room to include some of your keywords to serve your search engine optimisation strategy – ask SEO Consult for advice on this.

Once you have pages, set them out in logical groupings, and then arrange them in the order that people will look for them, eg. home – products – cookbooks will make one strand of your flow chart. Home – about us is another logical sequence for someone to follow. These sequences will form the basis of your site architecture and help you to create your menu system.

When you have planned your sequences, you can start drawing in the Links between pages. Some pages won’t be together in a sequence, but it might make sense to have links through them. An example of this is you might want to link between your ‘about us’ page and your policies page.

Site planning is a complex process and it is sometimes better to contact a Search Engine Optimisation consultant to be sure you cover all bases. However, even when using another party to develop your site it is important to have a solid idea of the pages you require. Once you have your site, strip your sitemap down and post it as a separate page with a link from the home menu to enable both web bots and your visitors to navigate at will.

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