“Site maps?” you say, “who even uses those?” Good point – site maps aren’t actually used all that much by web site visitors. But when it requires relatively little effort to implement one, imagine if the 5 or 10% of people who might actually use one when they got lost on your web site were able to. Your site map is often your only opportunity to lay out your entire site structure for visitors, so it needs to be done in a usable way.

The Nielsen/Norman Group made their report about Site Map Usability Guidelines freely available today. Based on user research on dozens of different web sites and site maps (ranging from B2C to high tech to governmental and everything in between), this report provides 47 design recommendations for your site map. To distill these down to just a few:

• Provide a site map (seems like a pretty obvious one, but one-quarter of the web sites out there don’t have one)
• Make it easy to find – call it “Site Map”, link to it from every page, and make the link obvious
• Don’t make it flashy or interactive – straight-up text links that are easily legible work the best
• Match the site map hierarchy to the way your site is actually built
• Keep it brief, but make it clear and don’t leave out important information
• Keep it up to date
• Multiple-column layouts were more effective than single-column, because visitors didn’t have to scroll through a bunch of information

If you don’t have a site map on your site, consider taking a look at the Nielsen guidelines and then implementing one. If you do already have one, take a look at the guidelines anyway and see what you can do to make it better.


Copyright 2008 - Enquiro Search Solutions.