EXP-035toolLive
Sitemap sketch.
Every information architecture project produces the same drawing: home at the top, sections across, everything else stacked underneath. It is usually made by hand, in whatever tool is open, and it takes an afternoon. Type the outline instead and the drawing makes itself, numbered and ready for a deck. Then read what it says back to you, because the shape of a site is an argument about it.
One page per line. Indent to go a level deeper. A pasted list of URLs works too: paths become the hierarchy. Nothing you type here leaves your browser.
The map33 pages · 3 levels deep
What the shape says
- Shape
- 4 top-level sections, 3 levels below the home page. Widest: Services (9 children).
- Crowded
- Services holds more than seven children. People stop reading a menu long before they stop scrolling it.
- Depth
- Nothing sits more than three levels below the home page.
- Repeats
- No label appears twice. Every page has one home.
Bench notes
- The layout
- Top-down, the way site maps have been drawn since people started drawing them. The home page hangs off a bus that feeds every top-level section, and each section's descendants stack downward beneath it, indented one step per level. That choice is not decoration: a wide site grows sideways and a deep site grows down, so the drawing tells you which kind of problem you have before you read a single label.
- What it flags
- Three things, live, as you type. Sections holding more than seven children, because people stop reading a menu long before they stop scrolling it. Pages sitting four or more levels down, which is where content goes to be forgotten. And labels that appear in more than one place, which means either the same page filed twice or two teams who named the same thing differently. None of it is a rule. All of it is a conversation worth having early, when the fix is a line in a text box.
- A URL list is an outline
- Most people already have their site written down somewhere: a sitemap export, a crawl, an analytics dump. Paste that instead and the paths become the hierarchy, with labels read off the slugs. It is a fast way to see the architecture you actually shipped rather than the one in the deck.
- The manners
- Everything runs in your browser and nothing you paste is uploaded, which is the point: you can put an unreleased structure into it. The download is a real SVG with the drawing's own fills and strokes baked in rather than borrowed from this page, so it stays correct in a deck, a PDF, or print.