Navigating to the site map

Down in the bottom, right corner. That will be where the few Websites that still have it, place a tiny link to their site map.

As site maps are both a great way for users to find their way trough content-rich sites, a great accessibility feature and the most effective way to ensure that search engines is crawling the entire Website, this ought to be different.

Site maps should absolutely be included in the top level, or main, navigation of most sites. Especially content-rich sites which is often hard to navigate, even with cleaver categorization and good navigational menus.

Navigating to the site map it self should be easy. The tricky part is navigating the site map it self!

A site map should provide links to all top level and sub level content categories. As well as all product categories, documentation and support pages. It might also be a good idea to include a top ten most popular pages segment.

The best practices for site map layout is freely open for discussion, but some general things are to be agreed upon. Like that the site map should not be table based (everyone seams to be doing them table based!), it should not be a too high page (to avoid too much scrolling) and that all top categories should be bold.

And a nifty, little tip here at the end: if there are more than fourty links on a site map it will become pretty cluttered. Consider separating the site map into two main categories on separate pages or provide a basic and an advanced site map.