A lot of the projects we are asked to be involved with are flagship websites for businesses and organisations who want to support their audiences in getting to information quickly, to instantly understand their offering or complete a task in as short a time as possible.

Something that helps us achieve these goals is taking time to analyse the sitemap to make sure it's full-filling all its roles of navigation, meaning and support. Here’s what we consider when creating a hard-working sitemap.

TLDR at the bottom

1. Informed by customer research

Every sitemap we create is informed by the understanding we have gained from customer research. We use the research to question priority, intent and language use around services and products. These findings then inform how we structure a site based on need and label pages or links based on their vernacular of the subject.

2. Use actionable language for clear direction

A key thing for us is to help the customer make a start on their journey into your website, so we aim to use language that matches an action they want to take. Sometimes this isn’t always the case, sometimes you need to fall back on more traditional labelling, still making sure that there is clear direction and structure to assist the customer.

3. Support the offer of the business or organisation

A navigation is usually the first or second thing a customer will scan through to get an understanding of what to do next. That is why, if you can, you should aim to get descriptive language in there that helps support the understanding of what your business or organisation can help them with. This ties in nicely with the actionable language as it will naturally tie in with the purpose of your business.

4. Keep it short and sweet

Too much choice can cause confusion, delay response and ultimately cause high bounce rates because there is no clear path. Keeping your primary navigation short and sweet will help customers gain a quick understanding of the site and help them progress on their journey (if you have used the right labelling).

Even when it gets to secondary navigation whether using drop-downs, mega menus or landing pages, try to reduce the options as much as possible. Customers primarily scan rather than read, so you need to keep that scan as short as possible.

5. Test with your customers

We will always test the sitemap, it’s a test that can be carried out remotely and actioned while you are looking into other parts of the project. It’s the very minimum of testing that should be done on any and all projects looking to improve the structure or architecture of a website or product. You can test language and journey through a series of sets of tasks based on the customers key objectives in a tree test, followed up with qualitative questions to gain further understanding into the results. A must all day long.

TLDR
A sitemap should be informed by customer research to achieve the correct use of language and priority. Use language which is actionable to create clear direction while also being short and sweet for quick action. The language should support the understanding of the business or organisations offering and most importantly be tested by the customers to qualify the structure works based on key objectives of those same customers.