Comments on The Lazy IA's Guide to Making Sitemaps

Erica Heinz — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:30 GMT

My latest site map has taken the form of a Word table containing custom bulleted lists. Each row is a main folder; columns 2-7 are subfolders. Lists use the folder wingding for the first bullet, page wingding for the second bullet. Or multiple pages wingding for a template. It’s helped me to visualize things while keeping to a format that everyone can edit.

But I’d love to see a good-looking Excel site map! Could I get it emailed as well? eheinz at liveperson dot com. Thanks.

Harry Brignull — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:30 GMT

This article is great, well worth downloading the zip file. If you already have an excel site map the whole process takes about 1 minute. Thank you Steven for sharing this with us!

Brian Donohue — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:30 GMT

Jon,

I’ve no idea how to post a document to this site, but I’d love to see an example of your Excel sitemap. We’ve recently struggled with the Excel-is-practical-but-Visio-looks-nice dilemma, so I’d like to see how your Excel solution found a happy medium. It does seem that putting the effort in to making an Excel sitemap look decent is a better solution to the problem discussed in this article. If we can avoid Visio altogether, and just update one document, that sounds ideal to me.

I’d be grateful if you could email your sample to bcdonohue at gmail dot com.

Andrew Gilmartin — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 20:51:36 GMT

Graphviz is a good program for displaying simple and very complex site maps. Since the documentation at the site can be overwhelming here is a simple example.

Using the “dot” program the following input will create a simple three page site map with three transitions from a to b and c and from b to c:


digraph "Site X" {

    // display the pages as gray rectangles
    node [ shape=box, color=gray, fontname="Helvetica" ]
    // display the transitions as gray, directed arrows
    edge [ color=gray, arrowhead=open ]

    // define all the pages
    a [ label = "A ..." ]
    b [ label = "B ..." ]
    c [ label = "C ..." ]

    // define the transitions between pages
    a -> b
    a -> c
    b -> c

    // done
}

I have named the pages a, b, and c but a meaningful names like Home and EmailVerification can also be used.

Jon Stuckey — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:29 GMT

I have to agree with Gordon on his comment that using Excel by itself is a great way to display a sitemap. My collegues and I have evolved from doing sitemaps years ago in Powerpoint (using the org chart feature), to Visio, to Excel. The biggest advantage as Gordon points out is that Excel is portable, virtually everyone can open, print, and edit an Excel file. Why create in Visio if you have to convert to PDF before you can send it to your customers? Most of my customers do not have Visio.

I find that Excel gives me the flexibility that I need to create detailed sitemaps using basic Excel features (color, font sizes, adjusting column width, row height, hiding grid lines, shading, lines, boxes, etc.). When I’m finished with the sitemap, you’d be hard pressed to tell that it was done in Excel.

My collegues and I agree that this is the easiest way to create AND maintain sitemaps. For example, when you need to add a new item, you can simply add a row and/or cut and paste as required.

Multiple worksheets allow you to have sitemaps for different audiences if you need to convey different experiences for different user groups (think customer, administrator, etc.).

I’d be happy to post an example of an Excel sitemap if someone can tell me how to attach a file to this site. I searched but couldn’t find how to do it.

Cheers!

Gordon Withers — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:29 GMT

A few other points. First, I don’t want to take away from the value and power of a visual – I think there’s a need for simplifying the site mapping process, and I definitely want to try out these ideas. I find site maps especially useful in reports and presentations.
One thing I’ve found useful, refering back to the original excel spreadsheet – I like to label “Level 1” “Level 2” as “1-Click” and “2-Click”. Even though this doesn’t account for all paths to a page, such as home page call-outs, or for the fact that many people don’t start at the home page, it does make explicit the answer to a question that every client will ask.
Also, I use a lot of columns. So, for example, I’ll have a column for page summary, a column for recommended words of copy, a column for author, etc. Then, when I need to print, depending on the audience, I’ll hide various columns. So, for authors, I’ll focus on the ‘number of words’, ‘author’, etc; whereas for a developer, I’d show a column indicating any modules (if the site is being built on a CMS or other platform). That way, the Excel file serves a lot of purposes. So, if it can feed some visio diagrams too – all the better!

Anthony Armendariz — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:27 GMT

Great, but what can you do for Omnigraffle Professional?

Audrey Crane — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:27 GMT

Would second the OmniGraffle / OmniOutliner recommendation.

I try to use Excel-only also (per Gordon’s excellent suggestion, especiall WRT the file format problem) but find it breaks down in two places:
• starts to be difficult to read past 2 levels
• doesn’t easily allow for brief page descriptions

Does anyone have an example of Excel-only that does this well?

allen o'leary — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 20:51:29 GMT

Agree about not using sitemaps much – just get too busy for big sites and then there’s all the exceptions… I put the sectional nav in Excel and flow-chart the exceptions (carts etc). However if I need something really good looking I’ll use GraphViz (PC and Mac) to produce beautiful diagrams for IA from Excel but it is *quite* involved: You have to use the ‘concatenate’ feature to write various pieces of column information into a single cell, then export that to a GraphViz friendly txt format. GraphViz can produce outstanding results but you have to sweat a little. http://www.graphviz.org/

C. Dinos Papoulias — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:26 GMT

I’ve had some success with OpenOffice.org Draw instead of Visio, but the stencil support isn’t there.

Donna Maurer — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:26 GMT

Thank you so much for the update. I was reading the old article recently and wondering whether I had the time to figure out for myself how to do this in V2003.

Gordon Withers — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:26 GMT

After years of trying to create the world’s greatest site map, I’ve found that the excel spreadsheet, all by itself, as displayed in step one – the input tab – does the trick. While lacking some of the visual appeal of a visio diagram, it provides many other benefits:
1. No issues with file formats – every client I’ve worked with has Excel, while only a few have Visio
2. Allows clients to edit the site map or insert comments and questions.
3. Conveys the depth and breadth of a site at a glance.
4. Easily add additional notes, such as references to a requirements document
5. Easy to add other navigation oriented notation, such as footer links versus primary navigation.
6. No space limitations – no more “oh no, my boxes are too big, this won’t fit on a letter sized piece of paper, does our printer have any legal paper?”
7. Major time saver: more time architecting, less time diagramming; allows information architects to focus on information architecture.

Bryan J Busch — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:26 GMT

OmniGraffle (Pro) 4 has a built-in outliner in a side window (“Utilities”) that will allow you to create your hierarchical text-only view of the site, and the program simultaneously draws the site map while you work.

Granted, this probably removes the handy “share with others” benefit described in the article, but if you’re main concern is saving time and effort, this is the method I recommend.

Jason Fields — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 09:13:56 GMT

I would also like to comment on another amazing diagramming application called OmniGraffle Pro from OmniGroup. I have been using the Pro version since version 3.0. In conjunction with OmniOutliner (very similar to the Outline Mode for MS Word) you can import directly into OmniGraffle to make sitemap diagrams.

The OmniGraffle / Outliner combo is for MacOSX exclusive, but to be honest its the best out there. It allows importing/exporting of Visio XML Diagrams, exports PDFs, JPGs, etc. I cannot speak more highly of this app suite. Where they failed at OmniWeb, they far exceeded with OmniGraffle Pro.

James Melzer — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:26 GMT

I’ve had some good luck with this Visio technique before. A couple of limitations are worth mentioning. Visio does not perform well with lots of boxes. It crashes a lot. Then there is the issue of formatting. The org chart wizard doesn’t give a lot of options as far as when the finished product looks like.