The Marriage of Content Strategy & Sitemaps
#1 in the Series of Making Stuff Up
If you’ve read my piece on not being afraid to make something up, you’ll know that I’m really into bending frameworks, templates, etc. Quoting myself,
“[…] those templates, processes, cool diagrams, they were made by another human, just like you — there’s not some Design God making the holy grail of diagrams that everyone must use — it’s another human that made something up because it helped them.
So if you’re finding yourself where what you’re using just isn’t communicating what you’re trying to say, make something up.”
Sitemaps
Sitemaps are fairly self-explanatory. Usually, they’re a top-down diagram of the hierarchy of your site. They may look a little different if they’re for a web app rather than an informational site, but sitemaps for informational websites are what I’m going to be dealing with here.
I’ve long noticed a struggle when talking about sitemaps — they just don’t go far enough. A client will ask how everything connects — what links to what on what page. Despite my repeated assurances that those decisions are typically made in the prototype, we’re just trying to organize on a high level, they want to talk about it now.
Enter in: the content strategy-sitemap hybrid
This is the color system I’ve come up with
- white/default for a page,
- purple to represent a section on a page,
- orange to denote external links.
Drilling in
Let’s take the About page/section of the website as an example.
On the about page, we have some sections that talk about our beliefs. In that section, we’ll link to the page that sums up these things in InterVarsity. The next section talks about our ministry impact, links out to our important documents and so on.
No content left behind
I’ve found that this type of diagram is very helpful when you are dealing with sites that have sections that convey important information, but don’t have an associated page.
For example, on the Our Ministries page — there’s a purple box for ‘How We Do Ministry’. There is no separate page for this — it’s just on the Our Ministries page. It’s very important content to us. If I didn’t have this hybrid diagram, I would have to verbally explain where that section would live, and probably repeat it again when someone forgot where that information was living.
I’ve not seen anybody else use sitemaps or content strategy in this way before, and I’d love to get feedback or other diagrams that others have used to convey both content strategy and the hierarchy of a site.
Other options
I posted this for feedback in Designer Hangout. Will Sykora shared with me something called DoGo mapping, and it might be my new favorite thing ever, check it out.
Ashley Crutcher is a UX Designer at InterVarsity located in Madison, WI. She tweets at @ashleyspixels and enjoys cuddling with her cat, crocheting/knitting, working out, and thinking too much about everything.
