One of the goals of The Sky Floor blog is to share our experience and knowledge with you so you have a trusted source of information about best practices, strategies, and tools of the trade.
When you are planning a new website, a sitemap becomes super handy to organize the project and visualize the structure of your website.
If you don’t know, a sitemap is a hierarchical view of all the pages on a website. Typically the top-level pages in the primary navigation are at the top, followed by their “children.”
On this website, the top-level pages are “Meet the Twins, Work, Ideas, Start Now.” Sub-pages, or child pages, may or not be in the navigation.
Over the years, we have used many tools to create, organize, and collaborate on sitemaps, but mainly they have added confusion to the process. Instead of being simple and easy to use, they were cumbersome or ugly. That is until we met FlowMapp.
FlowMapp
FlowMapp is our current sitemap weapon of choice. It has many features we love, but at the most basic level creating your sitemap is visual and behaves as you would expect. When you drag a page around, it connects to other pages in a way that makes sense. In short, it is truly intuitive.
You can also tag and label pages, so it is easy to keep track of status during your project. FlowMapp can double as many more tools, but it is worth its cost for pure and straightforward sitemaps alone. Speaking of cost, they have a 1 Active project free tier, so if you want to manage the structure of your site in one place, sign up!
Here are some other features we love:
Content Management
You can easily upload and track content on each page of the sitemap. Using labels makes it a breeze to collaborate and view the status of each page. We are finding ourselves using this part of the sitemap more and more as we have struggled to find a great way to capture content in other tools.
User Personas
FlowMapp has an excellent system for creating your site’s target User Personas. User Personas are your actual, ideal, or aspirational users. You get specific and name them, describe who they are, what they do, and their interests, all to tailor your website to your target audience.
FlowMapp allows you to canonize these personas into nice-looking cards that your whole team can reference. After all, what good is a persona if you can’t remember who they are?
Flowcharts
Once you have your sitemap and user personas, you can define a clear journey on your website for each of your users. FlowMapp gives you a tool to visually create this journey while linking out to the pages and users you want to take that path.
Again the interface is intuitive and visual. Not every project needs this level of depth, but it is available here.
Customer Journey Map
This view relies on a story to display how the user will interact with your website and brand. The huge plus with this view is a clean table view showing the various stages of engagement a user might have and assigning target emotions for each transition in their story.
Summary
We have loved FlowMapp and have found it an indispensable tool for organizing content, creating user personas, and imagining the customer journey for our client’s websites. If you want an intuitive interface to keep track of the structure of your site, look no further than FlowMapp!
