Practitioners sometimes inadvertently confuse the concept of information architecture (IA) with that of sitemap. While these two concepts are related, they are not the same thing. A sitemap is only one part of the site’s information architecture.

In This Article:

What Is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is a visual representation of the organization of your site’s content. A sitemap is a hierarchy of nodes (usually represented as boxes) that signify the pages or content on your website. Arrows or lines demonstrate the relationship between the web pages.

This is a sitemap that maps out the hierarchy and organization of content pieces on nngroup.com. Blue nodes represent the first-tier information, green nodes are second-tier objects, and yellow nodes are third-tier objects.

Some sitemaps also include annotations that further describe the functionality of each web page or piece of content. For example, they may indicate whether each label is only a category or an actual page on the website. Direct links to corresponding web pages might be included in the diagram as well. Overall, the main purpose of a sitemap is to display the flow of the website’s IA. Sitemaps are typically used as a planning document or reference tool to visualize how different pages and sections of the navigation fit together and to identify gaps in content.

Are Sitemaps Ever Visible to Users?

Sitemaps are typically not shown to users and are used only for internal planning purposes. Some websites display a sitemap to supplement the primary navigation features. In that situation, the sitemap is displayed as a hierarchical list of links to all the site’s pages. The prominence of sitemaps displayed this way has diminished over time, as they became replaced by other, more-advanced navigation features.

Thegoodguys.com.au: The sitemap is available from the site’s footer and maps out a list of links to all the site’s product pages. The labels that are bold represent higher-level categories.  ​​​​

What Is Information Architecture?

In UX design, the information architecture (IA) of a website refers to two things:

  1. The practice of deciding how to organize and maintain your content, what the relationships are between each piece of content, and how content is visibly displayed on your website’s navigation.
  2. The website’s structure, its organization, and the nomenclature of its navigation elements. The website’s IA refers to how information is organized, structured, and presented on that website.

The primary goal of building a website IA is to create a logical and intuitive knowledge system that makes content findable and discoverable to users.

An IA is not a single deliverable: there is no single document that you “finish” and check off your list. It’s an ongoing website-management process that involves updating and organizing content according to the system you created. When completing IA-related work, you might have a range of deliverables, depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

Here are some of the activities involved in an IA project and their corresponding deliverables:

IA Activity

What Is It?

Potential Deliverable

Content inventory

Identifying and categorizing all the digital content on your website. It is typically completed at the start of a redesign project 

A (digital) catalog or table

Content audit

Evaluating the usefulness of current content and deciding whether you should keep it, remove it, or update it

A table with all your content and whether you are keeping it, removing it, or planning to update it

Taxonomy development

Building out a set of controlled vocabularies that describe and classify your content

A hierarchical structure with the most-general classification terms at the top and more-specific ones at lower levels

IA UX research (i.e., card sorting, tree testing, and usability testing)

Conducting research to understand the findability and discoverability of the content on your site

Research reports in the form of documents, videos, and presentations

Planning the website structure

Mapping out the site’s content organization and hierarchy

Sitemap

How Do IAs and Sitemaps Differ?

A sitemap is only one part of the IA.

The IA also includes the following:

  • The nomenclature of all website elements that support users in finding and discovering information. This nomenclature includes the label for the site’s global navigation, local navigation, section navigation, anchor links, Learn more links, and so on. A sitemap is only a visual display of the hierarchy and organization of your content. It’s used as a reference tool to plan out the organization and structure of your website and doesn’t focus on the specific nomenclature.
  • The navigational UI components of the website. These include the placement of the search field, whether or not it uses breadcrumbs, pagination, tags, carousels. A sitemap includes only a broad level of detail around how the content will be generally structured. It doesn’t focus on smaller navigational UI components.

Creating a sitemap is only one part of creating the larger IA. There are many other activities involved in building out an IA.

The IA comes first, the sitemap follows.

IA is the foundation that defines the overall structure and organization of content. Once the IA is well established, sitemaps are created to visually represent it. Sitemaps are a bird’s eye view of all the content on your site and how it flows from one page to another. 

The IA is an abstraction, while the sitemap is an artifact.

The IA represents the conceptual organization of content. It’s the result of an involved process of defining relationships between content, understanding how content should be grouped, and how that grouping will affect navigation on the site. On the other hand, a sitemap is a tangible visual diagram that can be shared with stakeholders to communicate the organization of the content.

A sitemap is not as comprehensive as an IA.

A sitemap doesn’t include all the details collected from IA-related work. If sitemaps were as comprehensive and detailed as the IA, stakeholders would be overwhelmed by the amount of information. Sitemaps are intentionally designed to include only the details that stakeholders need to know for productive conversations and group decision making.

Neither the sitemap nor the IA are fixed entities.

A sitemap and IA can both evolve throughout the design process. Aspects of both might be changed based on user research. That being said, there are some aspects of IA that don’t change frequently. For example, in taxonomy development, controlled vocabularies (a predefined list of categorization labels that classify your content) are predetermined and intended to last a very long time.

Conclusion

The sitemap and the IA are both important for a well-designed and structured website. Practitioners are accustomed to having a deliverable for every UX-related activity they complete, and they might incorrectly assume that the end result of IA-related work is a sitemap. The IA is much more than just a sitemap. It’s a very involved process of constantly making decisions about how your content is organized and maintained.

References

Chris J. Pilgrim. 2007.(January 2007). Retrieved June 23, 2023 from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228654015_Trends_in_sitemap_designs_-_A_Taxonomy_and_survey

Abby Covert and Nicole Fenton. 2017. How to make sense of any mess, USA, DE: Columbia.