Lesson 5 | Site Maps | Create Your Online Store | Wix eCommerce

Hi, my name is Anthony Walker. I used to build sites for clients for about 10 years and one of the things I used to always have them do is build a sitemap for their website first. So in previous lessons we talked about our business plan and how to build our brand online. Today we're going to talk about how to create a sitemap. All right, for today's plan we're going to talk about the benefits of good site navigation, planning your site structure and completing a sitemap. So a good site structure creates a very smooth user journey for every person who accesses the website and, and who navigates it, making everything really accessible and also helps you convert sales quicker and easily. Now let's take a look at some Wix merchants. So we're going to take a look@hiphipshop.com it's a pretty nice website. Everything on it is pretty nice and pretty accessible. I want to really just focus in on the navigation. Everything up top is really easy to click on. When you hover over shop, you can see we have a really nice drop down menu that allows the user to go to any one of those product pages and see products that they can buy immediately, making it a really easy way for a checkout. So by looking at this example, I understand that this is a page where I can easily buy something really quickly. I can also learn about the product if I wanted to. So even if I didn't want to shop immediately, I can click on about and start to learn a little bit more about the products, what it actually is, and understand the actual brand and how it was inspired, allowing me to understand the products and therefore maybe even make a quicker purchase. Alright, so as you scroll down on the home page, you can kind of see that everything is divided here by like different categories, even by age. So if I came here and I was looking for a really nice toy for somebody who was age 4, I can easily click on age 4 and then see those products in that category, making it really easy for me to find exactly what I'm looking for. So by looking at this example we can probably conclude that it's probably best to sit down and really just kind of like analyze the actual products that you want to sell, how you're going to group them, how they're going to be categorized so you can make your user journey the best it could be. So now we're going to take a look at another great WIX merchant, still Life Ceramics. We're going to take a look at their navigation up top and at first we're going to go over to the shop page where you can see everything here is very organized and it gets you right to products that you can buy immediately. Next up you can see the workshops that they have as well that you can easily book as well as the classes. If you scroll down to the bottom, we can also see links to all of their physical locations and their addresses, making it really easy to buy anything online or stop into any one of their in store locations. So now you know what good site structure looks like. Let's talk about building a perfect site structure for your website. So it's very important that before you just start building your site, you stop and just think about all the products that you have and all the collections that you want to have, whether it be T shirts collection, maybe you have different sizes of products. It's very important to make sure you group everything together so you make the best user experience. So it's very important that your site structure actually include products that you can actually buy right on the homepage. Your navigation, are you going to have a horizontal menu, a vertical menu, maybe even a hamburger menu that gets people to shop quicker? So, so just think about everything from A to Z, just like Amazon. So it's very important that when you start to structure your product layout and how you want to sell your products, that you think a lot about everything from the actual materials in your product, the sizes, just everything, even the product variables. They're very important when you build out a store because if you start to develop this a little bit later on, it's going to really slow you down in terms of development if you don't plan it before you start to actually build the website. So now let's talk about site map best practices. So it's very important that you have a very, very clear way of displaying what's going to be accessible on the other side of the page once a user clicks on it. So a way you can do that is having a very short navigational bar, making sure that when somebody clicks on something, they see exactly what they clicked on. So being able to name the page exactly as what it's going to display is very important for SEO. Another very good thing to do when you build out your sitemap structure is make sure that you really build out drop downs and hierarchy. Because if you just start out building a website with tons of pages that travel horizontally, it's going to be too large and too hard to understand for or to comprehend by any user. So think about drop down menus, think about ways you can add better navigation for your user to make it easier and simple to travel from one page to the next. So now that you know how to create your sitemap, below, you're going to find some assets that can help you do that. Next up, we're going to move into designing your actual site layout.