Building a school website is an exciting project filled with opportunities to showcase your school's unique personality and achievements. But before you get caught up in stunning visuals and compelling content, there's a crucial step that often gets overlooked: creating your school’s sitemap.

A sitemap is your website's skeletal structure, the roadmap that guides how your pages connect and how users navigate your content. It's a strategic document with far-reaching impact, influencing everything from user experience to SEO/AEO.

Why is a Sitemap Important?

A school website sitemap creates order. It helps families find answers, helps search engines discover content, and helps school teams manage the site with less guesswork.

• User Experience: An intuitive, well-designed sitemap ensures your website is easy to navigate and that your content is grouped together and structured logically. A thoughtful sitemap usually means visitors can quickly find the important pages and information they need.
   
• SEO/AEO (Search/Answer Engine Optimization): Search engines use sitemaps to understand your website's structure and content. A sitemap in an XML file gives Google a list of pages it should know about and helps it find URLs and better understand content types like images, videos, and news articles.
   
• Foundation for Design: A sitemap helps teams see how pages connect before making big changes. That's especially useful for schools because websites often grow over many years. Old pages, duplicate content, hidden landing pages, and outdated departments can pile up fast. During a website redesign, the sitemap becomes the roadmap. It helps the team decide what to keep, remove, rewrite, combine, or move.

Creating an Effective Sitemap For Your School Website

Creating a sitemap might seem like a boring technical task, but it's actually a creative opportunity to shape how your school's story unfolds online. Carefully consider your audience's needs, analyze your website data, and plan for a seamless mobile experience.

Essentially, the best site navigation provides users with the tools they need to move efficiently through your site, easily find information, and complete tasks. The most fundamental navigation element is your main menu, typically located in the header.

Other tools, like section menus, search bars, breadcrumbs, sitemaps, clickable images, and call-to-action buttons, also contribute to a smoother user experience.

How to Create a Website Sitemap

Before getting into navigation best practices, think of your sitemap as a blueprint that guides your design team in serving your navigational needs.

1. Start with your audiences

List the groups that use your school website most often:

• Prospective families
• Current families
• Students
• Faculty and staff
• Alumni
• Community members
• Job seekers

Then write down what each group needs to find. For example, prospective families may need admissions, tuition, academics, campus life, inquiry forms, and visit options. Current families may need calendars, lunch menus, forms, portals, news, and staff directories.

2. Audit your current pages

Make a list of every page on the site. Include:

• Main navigation pages
• Landing pages
• Department pages
• Admissions pages
• News and blog pages
• Athletics pages
• Calendar pages
• Forms
• Hidden or old pages
• PDF-heavy pages

Then mark each page as:

• Keep
• Update
• Combine
• Redirect
• Remove

This helps clean up old content before it gets carried into a new structure.

A sitemap usually looks like an outline:

Home
├── About
│   ├── Mission
│   ├── Leadership
│   ├── Contact
│   └── Employment
├── Academics
│   ├── Lower School
│   ├── Middle School
│   ├── Upper School
│   └── College Counseling
├── Admissions
│   ├── Request Information
│   ├── Visit
│   ├── Apply
│   ├── Tuition & Financial Aid
│   └── Admissions FAQs
├── Student Life
│   ├── Athletics
│   ├── Arts
│   ├── Clubs
│   └── Wellness
└── Families
    ├── Calendar
    ├── Forms
    ├── Lunch Menu
    └── Parent Portal

The Harvey School’s hamburger menu helps organize a detailed yet intuitive site structure and menu.

Try to keep important pages within a few clicks from the homepage.

3. Check for gaps and duplicate content

Look for common issues:

• Admissions info split across too many pages
• Tuition pages that are hard to find
• Academic pages with thin content
• Multiple calendar pages
• Old PDFs replacing web pages
• Staff resources mixed with family resources
• Pages with school-centered labels instead of family-centered labels

For example, “Prospective Families” may be clearer than “Future Community Members.” “Tuition & Financial Aid” is usually clearer than “Affording Our School.”

4. Create the XML sitemap

The XML sitemap is the file search engines read. Many website platforms create this automatically. If not, you can use a CMS tool, a crawler, or a manual XML file to share with Google.

A few helpful reminders about your school's sitemap and navigation

Consider this when creating your sitemap carefully—you’re laying the foundation for a well-organized and user-friendly website.

Main Navigation: The Heart of Your Website

Your main navigation is like the table of contents for your school's story. It's the primary way visitors access the most important information about your school. This section usually lives in your website's header, and it should provide a clear overview of what your school offers.

• What to Include: Focus on the essential pages that every website visitor might need, such as "About Us," "Academics," "Admissions," "Arts," "Athletics," and "Giving."
   
• Keep it Concise: While it might be tempting to include everything, aim for no more than eight top-level pages in your main navigation. Too many options can overwhelm visitors.
   
• Tiered Structure: Organize your main navigation with a tiered structure.
  • Tier 1: These are your top-level pages (e.g., "Academics").
  • Tier 2: These are the pages that sit under your top-level pages (e.g., "Lower School," "Middle School," "Upper School" under "Academics").

Thinking about these two tiers helps you map out the relationships between pages and create a logical flow for your visitors

The colors and simplicity of International Community School Addis Ababa’s navigation keep things neat and comfortable, but notice the action-oriented language that prompts visitors to join, experience, connect, and more—a great strategy!

Utility Navigation: Enhancing the User Experience

Utility navigation shows those extra elements that make your website more user-friendly and help visitors find what they need quickly. Put yourself in the shoes of your website visitors.

• Are they able to find what they need quickly and easily?
• Is the navigation intuitive and consistent across all devices?
   
• Audience-Specific Links: Does your school have different audiences with unique needs? Create sections with links tailored to them. For example:
  • For Parents: Links to the parent portal, calendars, forms, and resources.
  • For Faculty/Staff: Links to internal resources, handbooks, and communication tools.
  • For Alumni: Links to alumni news, events, and giving opportunities.
     
• Quicklinks: Provide shortcuts to your most popular pages or external resources. This could include links to:
  • The school calendar
  • Lunch menus
  • The school store
  • After-school programs
     
• Calls to Action: Encourage visitors to take the next step with clear and prominent calls to action. This could include buttons or links for:
  • Inquiries
  • Campus tours
  • Applications
  • Donations

Footer Content: Essential Information and Resources

The footer of your website is often overlooked, but it's valuable real estate! Use it to provide key information and reinforce your school's identity.

• Branding: Include your school logo to maintain brand consistency.
   
• Contact Information: Make it easy for visitors to get in touch by providing your school's:
  • Full address
  • Phone number
  • Email address
  • Map or directions
     
• Important Links: Include links to essential pages that might not fit in your main navigation, such as:
  • Your sitemap
  • Privacy policy
  • Accessibility statement
  • Non-discrimination policy
  • Terms of use
     
• Social Media: Connect with your community by including links to your school's social media profiles.
   
• Accreditation and Partnerships: Display logos of accreditations and associations to build trust and showcase your school's credentials.

Keep Reading: Footers: The Forgotten Section of School Website Design

Top Navigation Strategies for an Improved User Experience

• Start with Your Current Sitemap: Your current sitemap, regardless of its effectiveness, serves as a valuable starting point. If it's well-organized, there's no need for drastic changes. If it needs improvement, use it as an inventory of existing pages and content to build upon.
   
• Use Website Analytics: Leverage tools like Google Analytics to understand user behavior. Analyze page visits, time spent on each page, and user interactions to prioritize in-demand content and optimize its accessibility.
   
• Seek Inspiration: Explore the web designs of other schools and look for website navigation examples from organizations outside of education. Identify effective website navigation types and potential pain points to inform your design choices.

School Website Navigation Best Practices

While there's always room for creative expression, sticking to these fundamental principles can significantly enhance your website's navigation:

1. Keep it Simple: A straightforward and predictable navigation structure is crucial. Users should be able to find essential information effortlessly. Prioritize clarity over excessively unique, creative, or complex designs.

2. Limit the Number of Options: When looking at your menu, it should be easy for a user to skim through all of the choices quickly. When users are overwhelmed by too many choices, they may not make any choice (except to leave your site). Give them a manageable number of choices. Aim for six or fewer main navigation items and three or four buttons within a group.

3. Minimize Clicks: Use drop-down menus or mega menus so users can access pages directly or locate pages that might logically belong to multiple sections.

Fort Smith Public Schools puts a lot of these strategies into practice, plus the simplicity and the icons make for a great mobile user experience.

4. Maintain Consistency: Be consistent with the placement of section menus and other navigational elements throughout the site, so users can find and navigate to interior pages without confusion and access important resources and pages.

5. Use Clear Language: Your website is a collection of pages to answer questions and solve the tasks that users come to the site for. It’s not a replication of your school’s departmental structure and internal naming conventions, so use simple and universally understood terms for page names and menu items.

For example, page names like “Office of Advancement” or “Pedagogical Approaches” may not be universally understood — but terms like “Alumni” and “Our Approach” will be.

6. Optimize for Mobile: Modern website navigations prioritize a mobile-first design and create a seamless experience across all devices. Make sure users can easily access all pages, regardless of screen size.

7. Provide Guidance: Actively guide users through your site by adding featured links in mega menus and clear calls to action throughout. Offer guidance by linking to related content or suggesting relevant pages.

Key Takeaway

You can create a school website that's both visually appealing and easy to navigate. Begin your redesign with a strategic sitemap, collaborating closely with your design team to ensure it aligns with your goals and user needs. Don't forget to prioritize user experience by making information easy to find, and regularly review and update your sitemap as your school's programs evolve.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Connor has spent the last decade within the field of marketing and communications, working with independent schools and colleges throughout New England. At Finalsite, Connor plans and executes marketing strategies and digital content across the web. A former photojournalist, he has a passion for digital media, storytelling, coffee, and creating content that connects.