I recently had this question put to me:

Hi Stefan,

I found your article while doing a search about sitemaps, so I figured I’d see what your take on it is.

I work at an agency that does small business websites, some as small as 5 or 6 pages, like an online brochure. I know sitemaps are useful, and help with SEO, but it’s part of our standard design to put text links to each page in the footer of each page. I think a sitemap page with 5 links on it is kind of silly, and a waste of space. Should we continue with the sitemaps or do the footer links suffice in those cases?

Thanks a ton!

I agree. Sitemaps are really useful when there is a lot of content in a web site – if you have a really simple site, it is probably overkill.

That said, if you anticipate that the site might grow (in terms of content), I would create the sitemap and use it as the 404 page. Once the content builds and you deem it necessary, you can link to the sitemap that will already be ready to go.

When considering any aspect of a web site, keep this rule in mind:

Design for people and not for search engines.

… After all, search engines in the end, are trying to find the best websites for people!

Hope that helps,

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Professional Web Design, Real World Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.