How to use sitemaps to plan your design project
Sitemaps are one of the more basic deliverables one can use to organize a design project. In fact, they are so basic, that most of us don’t use them, especially when a project becomes more complex and doesn’t follow the basic tree structure. I still find sitemaps useful though to not only visualize connections between pages ( you will never be able to put all connections onto paper when a site gets more complex though) but it also helps to plan the whole design process.
During my last project, we had booked a design agency to do a few designs for major landingpages of our e-commerce website. Although we had thought about which screens we really needed, we had to request additional screens during the process of implementation, since we simply had forgotten some important pages. To get a clear overview over the pages we needed and how they were connected to each other, I did a simple sitemap to visualize the major connections between the pages (sorry for the German text. I will try to upload an english version as soon as I have time).
Sitemap with colors for each major template (sorry for the German text)
I then used color to mark the various sites based on the template the would be using, giving me a good overview on which templates I need. A legend explains the use of color and is used to display all templates in a normal list. Dashed circles represent mere links, not templates on their own. They lead to subsites, which use a specific template, so I gave those links their respective color.
If you want to add additional information to the sitemap, you can attach deadlines to each template, thus giving everyone a good overview on when each template will be finished and which parts of the website will use it. This is not only helpful for designers but also for frontend developers who need to implement those templates. Furthermore it offers the project manager an additional tool to plan the project from another point of view and to prioritize different sections of the website.
I know that a sitemap itself is a very basic tool and the way I use it is nothing special, but I wanted to show you this method anyway, in case someone might find it useful.
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