User Experience Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for user experience researchers and experts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I am currently creating a sitemap for my website.
I have a navigation bar, which contains menu items pointing to different parts of the website. I've illustrated these as separate boxes on my site, beneath the home page.
However, I also have a search box, which will be visible on all pages as it is fixed to the header of the page.
Would I need to represent a search box on my sitemap and if so, how and where would I illustrate it?
Standard operating procedure is to have a header and footer information pulled out in the sitemap.
I've placed this header & footer information in many different places. Sometimes it's placed next to the legend; sometimes at the top or right. I don't think that matters as long as the information is well organized and clearly laid out.
What is the purpose of the search in the header? It's usually locate some content on your website and the purpose of the sitemap is primarily for SEO (a single page allowing robots to quickly navigate to all pages and index them). I would argue that a human user would rarely go to the sitemap page if you have a search field in the header on each page.
Assumption: you wont have two search boxes, one in the header and one on the sitemap page itself.
If the purpose of your search field is to search other website entities in addition to pages. Only display the search field in the header and don't show it "in-page" on the Sitemap page. You don't need that duplication.
If the pure purpose of your search field is to find pages which are all listed on the sitemap, you can apply the same design pattern used on a mac:
Highlight matching items in sitemap or fade out items that don't match your search query. But again, I think it would be a "cool" feature, but for very small segment of your traffic.
Are you referring to a sitemap or wireframe?
A sitemap is to illustrate content structure of your website. A search box indicates functionality. Therefore it doesn't actually belong on the sitemap.
What does make sense on a sitemap is search results. This content is accessible everywhere if the search box persistent on your header. It would make sense to have this as one of the top level items on your sitemap.
