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Site Map Diagrams A visual site map 17 is quick to make, fairly expressive and easy to change. People have all sorts of methods for building site map diagrams. Whatever your tool, the diagram is a useful way to demonstrate hierarchy. It clearly shows the relationships between pages and tells you where your website is too shallow or deep. What’s it for? To visually explain the relationships between pages on your website. What’s good about it? Nothing better illustrates the hierarchy of a website than a diagram with lines and arrows indicating the relationships between pages. Clients naturally understand it. What’s bad about it? The actual relationships between pages can be hard to grasp. What looks good on a chart might not work well on a website. And a site map diagram is not really useful during the development phase, quickly becoming a dead documents. In sum A site map diagram is a quick way to sketch navigation and hierarchy. Don’t try to cram in other bits of information that just don’t fit. A few resources to learn more about site maps and diagrams: A Visual Vocabulary for Sitemaps 18 The Lazy Information Architect’s Guide to Making Sitemaps

Organize the site content into taxonomies and hierarchies of information;

Research and design the core site navigation concepts;

Information architecture encompasses a broad range of design and planning disciplines, and the boundaries among information architecture, technical design, user interface, and graphic design are necessarily blurred by the need for all of these communities of practice to cooperate to produce a cohesive, coherent, and consistent experience for the site user.

Navigation: Which one do I use and where in the world do I start?Research shows that confusing navigation is the number one way to lose customers. If people have a hard time finding their way around your website, they're just going to give up and leave. And when you have great products that really sell themselves like Brainwaves does, you don't want your navigation to get in the way of a sale. When you enter on the Brainwaves homepage, there are three different ways to navigate the site. There is a global horizontal bar organized by age group. There's a global vertical bar that's not particularly organized at all and mixes functional (shop by price, age) with topical. And there's another featured section in the middle that is also organized by topic, some of which are in the left sidebar and some that aren't. The housekeeping links such as about us and contact are buried in the footer. While they need to be there, they also need to be more prominent "above the fold" (visible without having to scroll).With the variety of toys for sale on Brainwaves, I like the idea of having two sets of navigation: one for age and one for toy category. It seems sensible that people would use one of those two systems to browse. However, they should be kept entirely separate from each other. Research also shows that users scan web pages, and won't bother to look at lists with more than 5-7 links. If you have more than that, break them up into categories and subcategories that are logical and easy to scan. Always keep your customers in mind; organize your navigation in a way that makes sense to them, call each link what they would call it ("educational toys" takes visitors to the home page, so call it "home"!), and make it easy to scan and browse. If you aren't sure if your organization or labeling (words in the links) make sense to your customers, test it! Find a friend who is in your target market and ask his/her opinion.