From Site Map to Content Hierarchy
Posted on June 10, 2009
Filed Under content first, content modelling | Leave a Comment
Site Map
What is a site map? Its a helicopter view of a web site with all the pages arranged in a easy to view and/or accessible manner. The best site maps fit onto a single page. For the more complex sites out there, the ability to drill down into specific areas of the site but keeping to the one page rule provides an alternative site navigation scheme.
In the majority of design-led projects, the site map is presented in graphical form that provides an essential first look at the structure/grouping of pages within a web site. The problem I have with these diagrams is that they are typically presented along with the completed designs. The finished article. However, for me they are the critical starting point for the journey to the centre of the content hierarchy.
Towards a Content Hierarchy
Web site pages are arranged in an hierarchical manner. URLs are just the means to access pages and/or content residing on those pages. The first thing I do when I get a site map is pray that its open to change and then try and express in terms of a content hierarchy. Take a look at the following site map:
Flattening a site map is a great way to start putting the meat on your content hierarchy bones. Reformatting the site map highlights errors and/or glaring omissions in your content model, site pages, content types, and so on. It’s just another means to help build/validate your content model. Believe me when I say that:
A site map is an innocent picture that hides a 1000 discussions.
So take a look at the flattened site map, the beginning of our content hierarchy (sometimes referred to as a content tree):
/content/ /content/contact-us /content/terms-and-conditions /content/privacy /content/business/overview /content/business/blog/2009/05/content-first /content/business/blog/2009/04/content-modelling /content/business/blog/2009/04/content-modelling/comments/1 /content/business/our-understanding /content/solutions/overview /content/solutions/delivery /content/solutions/services /content/solutions/how-we-work /content/solutions/projects /content/solutions/case-studies /content/solutions/case-studies/2009/the-amazing-chocolate-factory /content/solutions/case-studies/2008/ground-transportation-system /content/solutions/testimonials/2009/google-loves-us /content/voices/blog/2009/05/strategy-article /content/voices/blog/2009/03/technology-article /content/voices/team/cleve-gibbon /content/voices/team/stuart-dean /content/voices/offices/london /content/voices/offices/poznan /content/voices/careers /content/community/partners /content/community/events /content/community/events/2009/06/24/eric-evans-domain-driven-design /content/community/technology /content/community/press /content/community/join-our-community
At the moment this content hierarchy is at the page level but it has already raised a number of questions around missing content and roughly how it will be access across the site. Here are some quick observations I’ve made after doing this:
- Why are the offices under voices?
- How are we going to get hold of articles archives
- Would the site be better served by blog channels (business, voices, all) that provides an aggregated view of blog style posts?
- /content/blog-channel/business
- /content/blog-channel/voices
- /content/blog-channel/all
- How can we view events for in 2009, 2008, May 2009? The urls seem easy to construct using the above naming scheme.
- What does join-our-community do?
- Are they other ways of list items other than by date, e.g. /2009/05?
So what’s the difference between the site map and the content hierarchy. Well, the content hierarchy is the beginning of something more concrete that you can start validating in parallel with your content model. But that is something I’ll leave to a future post.
In Summary
The takeaway point here is that a lot of this work can be done BEFORE the creative works start. This is information architecture and content strategy. I’m not sure where the purists position it, but as a keen practitioner, its an essential piece of work done later rather than sooner. A content hierarchy should serve as input into the creative phase and not the output.
Of course, this is just the beginning. With a sprinkle of content modelling, we start dissecting the page and pulling out the content types and subsequently mapping these onto the available URLs. Although the content hierarchy is not an exact 1-to-1 mapping onto URLs, it does provide a great insight into the URL strategy that will be applied across the web site.
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