Should a sitemap show how a web page is linked to all the other pages, and if so, how?

Question

I'm starting out in UX design. I am attempting to map the relationship of the pages of a website, but am unclear if the sitemap is the best place to do it, or whether another way to show it is best.

The top navigation bar of the site has an About, Buy, Contact, News, and Login pages. In the About page, there are links to Buy, News and to the Contact page.

How do I show those links existing within the About page? If I put the Buy as a category next to the About page on the sitemap, as well as underneath it to show it's linked into the About page, it will make the sitemap bloated and redundant, or make people think there's several Buy and News and Contact pages, when in fact it's just links.

Or is that something I show when I do userflows and wireflow, and not on the Sitemap itself?

Thanks for taking the time to help me clear my mind around this.

Answer 1

The question is what do you want to represent? Is it the structure of the site or is it the navigation of your site. As I understand you try to represent the navigation. In your example you have the same pages multiple times in your navigation which should be avoided since it might be confusing to users. Or is it not the navigation but a crosslink inside the page ABOUT?

If your sitemap represents the navigation you should mark the linking navigation items by using a different visual representation so it is clear that it is a link only. I would usually use this if I include the footer into the sitemap since the footer might include some links.

If your sitemap should represent crosslinks the crosslink should be inside the page where the crosslink resides. But I would be careful with that since it can make your sitmap difficult to read.

If the crosslinking is a important part of the structure of the page I usually highlight only the most important crosslinks in the structure. But often the stakeholders do not understand that. Therefore I put a clickable wireframe together to show how the navigation might behave and line out which cross-links are on which page.