Planning a WordPress website – putting together a sitemap

You’re planning a new website. It’s hard to know where to start – there’s a lot to think about! At Angry Creative, we find that one of the best ways to get started is to draw up a sitemap. Getting your sitemap nailed will help you think through the site’s content, structure, functionality and design.

Brain dump

Get a piece of paper and mind-map your new site. What’s everything you want to include on the new site? How does it join together, approximately?

You might end up with something like this!

Bullet-time

Once you’ve done your brain dump, it’s time to bring some order to proceedings. People are used to websites that have a hierarchical structure – hence the omnipresent website menu dropdown, so the easiest way to check that your new sitemap will be usable for your visitors is to type it up as an indented, bullet-point list. Something like this:

• Home
• About
  • History
  • Team
  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy Policy
• Blog
• Products
  • Kettles
  • Hoovers
    • Upright
    • Compact
    • Handheld
  • Fridges
  • Checkout & Payment
• Services
  • Fixing Fridges
  • Hoover servicing
• Contact
  • How to find us

If you can’t get it as neat as this, just give it your best shot and we can help you to finalise it.

What next?

Once you’ve got the sitemap together, send it over to us. Once we’re all happy with the sitemap, we’ll need to work out what templates and functionality the sitemap indicates. At that point, you can start preparing the content that’s going to populate the sitemap! You can read more about preparing content for WordPress sites here.