The Difference Between a Site Map & Hierarchical Structure
A website design demands easy site navigation to enable visitors to engage with your site's mission and message. Before you can create and launch your site, you must determine the information it will present and how it will be organized. Within its design, your active site can include a page that provides direct links to areas of interest. These two types of organizational presentations -- navigation and concept development -- define the differences between a site map and hierarchical structure.
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Different Audiences
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The hierarchical structure of your website forms the in-house design outline for all members of your development team. Once you finalize this master guideline document, you can start your style, design and coding efforts knowing that the elements you're designing fit within an approved overall structure. Within the structure you create, you can designate a page for a site map. This difference between internal and external guide documents defines their two audiences.
Site Map
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A site map provides a page of direct links to the sections, or even specific pages, within a website. It can help visitors reach a desired destination page quicker than a search function by enabling them to scroll through an organized outline and recognize the content they want to view, rather than having to compose a query that may not yield the desired result. Site maps can provide an exhaustively granular set of links to virtually every page of a smaller site, or deliver visitors to a topic area within a larger site so they can locate specifics within a section.
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Hierarchical Structure
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A hierarchical structure represents the organizational outline of a website. Just as you would outline a long, multisection document before you wrote it to assure that it covered all your subject matter and presented it in a logical sequence, a hierarchical structure shows what you'll put where in a site that's under development. Additionally, your design efforts gain efficiency when you create and revise a structural outline rather than develop and restructure an entire website. You can view your hierarchical structure as an in-house site map.
Detail Levels
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A hierarchical structure begins as a general top-level outline, defining site sections and determining what goes where. Like a traditional outline, the structure expands as you identify, and later assign, the elements that belong within each section. Although you can use a hierarchical structure as the basis for coding a site map, the structure can change extensively during site development, whereas the map changes only if you change your site design.
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