Best way to provide a Site Map?
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The site map for Calthorpe has become a bit of a monster:
- Contains hundreds of links.
- Repeated link text (month names and year numbers especially).
- Enormous, nested lists are hard to skim through in any device.
I'm thinking of keeping the sections as headings, but only keeping the first level of list items. For the archives, I'd use a sub-heading for each year like "Letters from 2007" with a single-level list of the months available for that year. But this still has the problem of repeated link text unless I make it extremely verbose. But that would still make it time-consuming to skim through.
I know the Site Map needs to change, but I'm not sure what to do. What do you folk think?
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My CV type thing and my Life of Ben (Blog). Nigel Peck's Accessify Forum Requirements.
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Delete everything more than two levels down, then make the deeper content easier to find by linking from within individual sections? I'm thinking, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that someone searching for a piece of student art is more likely to go to 'Student's work > Art work' and search from there, rather than trawl through the whole site.
Also, make the search more visible. People will go straight to it to find what they want. Maybe add the Google search box to the banner, if the school allows?
Have you investigated the custom search available through Google Coop? It relies on javascript and iframes, unfortunately, but it might let you set up filtered searches by URL. We've experimented with one that only searches URLs prefixed by http://www.nmm.ac.uk/... for example.
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Jim O'Donnell
work: Royal Observatory Greenwich
play: eatyourgreens
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We used to have a site map with "selected highlights" of the site shown, with the addition of a comprehensive a-z index. The a-z also contained variations on the descriptions of pages (e.g. 'car' and 'motor'). It was very labour intensive at the time (we had no cms) - but popular with users (who had the choice of the concise sitemap or the comprehensive a-z).
On the Google co-op's, you should try the AJAX API Jim. You don't have to use frames (obviously you do have to use JavaScript). I've been playing with it, I think if some of it's secrets could be unlocked it could be really useful to a lot of smaller sites.
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Stephen Kelly, Designer
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You might like to try the approach used by the HSE for their A - Z Index. A main title page with links to sub pages and links into specific subjects.
I know it's a lot more pages, but it might be better in the long run.
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Mike Abbott
Accessible to everyone
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thinking about it does the page need the left hand menu as the links would be repeated in the "site map" then you would have a lot more space and you could easily then put the links into multiple columns
removing the image on the right hand would also give some more space
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^^ what monkeygod said
we always remove left-nav (only keeping the main nav for orientation and consistency)
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I have a page on Eteach awaiting to be fixed called “School Directory” that is a 2.5MB HTML file but my browser would grind my PC to a halt making it unusable! Your school site is only going to get bigger. Separate pages are the only way unless you want to go down the AJAX way._________________
Johan De Silva / Portfolio | Place of Work @Flipside | Read my movie reviews punk!
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| twoplayer wrote: |
| ^^ what monkeygod said
we always remove left-nav (only keeping the main nav for orientation and consistency) |
Same here.
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Having a second look my question is, why keep letters that are from the previous school year as they do not appear to be relevant?
Using the HSE technique you could have letters split into
- General school letter
Year 7 letters
Year 8 letters
Year 9 letters
Year 10 letters
Year 11 letters
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Mike Abbott
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I'd only show as far down as the main sections in the site map and then make those link to site maps for those sections only. As has already been suggested make your site map pages a one column layout.
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Why don't you split the sitemap up into sections?
e.g. see how BT does it...
goto their homepage and click sitemap in the bottom right corner http://www.bt.com/...
Designer Websites
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Here is Google's siteMap that does not list all the pages but all the major sections of Google. IMO a well designed website with the technology for a site search should not require the use of a sitemap._________________
Johan De Silva / Portfolio | Place of Work @Flipside | Read my movie reviews punk!
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Wow, lots of ideas. Many things I hadn't thought of trying. 
One thing we can all agree on is there's too many links. EYG, Daz and Johan were specific about that in either what they said or examples they gave. I also agree that every page doesn't need to be linked. It's a Site Map, not a Site Schematic.
I reduced the "Letters Home" section to a single-level list, much like you see for blog archives. This solves the unwieldiness of big, nested lists (both visually and aurally). It also makes the link text unique, which solves another issue.
Another common suggestion was removing the photo sidebar and using multiple columns for the listings. Since most entries are very short and there's lots of them, this makes a lot of sense to me.
All in all, these changes gives an HTML saving of 82%! There's a lot less scrolling required from users and it's much more scannable.
All hail the first demo! Columnar Site Map.
I wanted to use em for each column width and float them across the page. This way, they would wrap (or unwrap) to suit the current text size and available screen space. I've got it working nicely in Firefox 2 and Opera 9. But there's always a "but" and it's always IE.
As you resize IE6 or IE7, the last column will overlap the 3% padding on the right of #content. This create a horizontal scrollbar and makes the top of #content shift below the bottom of #navigation. Once the column hits the viewport it wraps to the next line and everything snaps back into place. If you make the viewport wide enough so there's no overlap, everything snaps back into place. It's just the transitional phase which stops the show.
I've made a demo of this: Wrappable Site Map. Any ideas for fixing that?
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My CV type thing and my Life of Ben (Blog). Nigel Peck's Accessify Forum Requirements.
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Usability has been greatly improved for all.
The school of thought that every page should be listed on the siteMap must have come from Search Engine Optimisation for unaccessible websites with Java or Flash only navigation.
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Johan De Silva / Portfolio | Place of Work @Flipside | Read my movie reviews punk!
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