Site Map

A site map is a document that expresses your site's structure, including which pages exist, how they nest, and how navigation connects them. It might be a boxes-and-lines diagram or a spreadsheet, but either way it's the blueprint for your information architecture.

Don't confuse this with the XML sitemap that search engines crawl, which is a machine-readable file rather than a planning document. The site map you build during a project is for humans, helping everyone agree on what the site contains before anyone designs a single screen.