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Designing Your Site Map Page
Author: Alyice Edrich
Designing the site map page can often feel like a waste of web space (and time), but if done correctly, it can be a wonderful place for new visitors to explore your website in more detail and a place to help search engine spiders locate the key entry pages of your website.
When designing your site map, keep these three points in mind:
Keep It Simple
Your visitors should not have to learn complicated programming or read through a “how to use this page” message just to dig deeper into your website.
The simplest way to display the infrastructure of your website is to design a site map that lists the contents of your website by alphabetical or categorical order. (Personally I prefer categorical order because I can jump directly to the section I am interested in and find a jumping off point for what I am searching for.)Use Hypertext Linking System
Instead of designing a complicated site map with expanding links, visual aides, animated graphics, charts, etc., design a simple site map that gives your visitors an overview of what your website is all about with a static web page that uses a simple linking structure.
Your links can be named based on the category names within your website or by terms your visitors are more likely to use when searching for information within your website. (A good example of such a site map can be found here.)Keep To One Page
Keep your site map on one web page and make sure your visitors can view the entire site map without having to scroll left to right. What this means is that you want to design your site map for your average user’s screen size. (You can determine this by checking your stats counter. Most stats counters give you this information in an area called system stats or resolution stats.)
The key to designing a user-friendly site map is to consider who your visitors are and how they will best benefit from your site map. By making sure your site map doesn’t overwhelm your visitors, you can increase your visitor click-through rate, and quite possibly your sales.
Read more on web design for your small business
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