Planning website structure: site map, page templates and navigation

Start from questions

List what visitors come to find out or do:

• "Do you offer X, and is it right for my case?"
• "How much does it cost, and what affects the price?"
• "Can I trust you? Who have you worked with?"
• "How does the process work?"
• "How do I contact you or buy?"

Then look at search demand: which services and questions people actually search for, in which languages. Each substantial query group usually deserves its own page. See how people search in Azerbaijan.

Group and prioritise

Arrange pages into sections that make sense to visitors:

• services or products, grouped by type or audience;
• industries or use cases, if you serve several;
• proof: projects, cases, reviews;
• company: about, team, careers;
• resources: articles, guides, FAQ;
• contacts and practical information.

Keep the hierarchy shallow — two or three levels. Important pages should be reachable from the home page in one or two clicks.

One page, one intent

A single "Services" page that lists everything competes for nothing in particular. Separate pages for each main service allow each to answer its specific questions and rank for its queries. The same applies to industries, product categories and locations — but only where the content is genuinely different. Pages that differ only by a word look like duplicates to visitors and search engines.

Templates

Identify the page types: home, service, category, product, article, case study, contact. Each type becomes a template with defined blocks. Designing and building templates rather than individual pages keeps the site consistent and lets your team add pages later without a developer.

Navigation

• Main menu with the key sections, the same on every page.
• Footer with secondary links, contacts and legal pages.
• Breadcrumbs on deeper pages, showing where the visitor is.
• Clear calls to action on every page — contact, booking, purchase.
• Search, if the site is large.

URLs

• Readable Latin words reflecting the hierarchy: /services/websites/ecommerce.
• Stable: decide them once; changing later requires redirects.
• Consistent language prefixes for multilingual sites: /en/, /az/, /ru/. See multilingual URL structure.

Internal links

Pages should link to related pages in their text: a service page to relevant case studies and articles, an article to the service it relates to. Internal links help visitors continue and help search engines understand which pages are important and how they relate.

Documenting the structure

The result of this stage is a site map (a tree of pages), a list of templates with their blocks, and — for existing sites — a table mapping every old URL to its new place. These documents guide design, content and development. See website project stages.