list the subcategories. It may turn out that this might serve as the site's horizontal menu bar going across the top, but in designing the layout you could just as easily have the menu vertically on the left or right sides of the page. The site map is just that, a map, a path to every page on the website. Once you have the entire site mapped out on paper, you may use the site map to layout the navigation structure when building the new site. For a business that has thousands of products you may want to do some research on how to best categorize each product. In this case there should be more than one way to search for product. For example, a website selling ceiling fans may have each product showing up for multiple categories. Three customers may have purchased the same fan model but each started their search in a different category, one customer searched by antique style, another by brass finish, the third searched on size. Each began their search a by different category but ended up with the same ceiling fan. Some CMS‟s have components and modules that you can install to handle sizeable product catalogs. Your choice of CMS may be based on its ability to handle a large catalog. That's why it's best to use your requirements document from your initial needs assessment meeting with the client to help determine the best platform for their website. Reserving the home page body for the main categories in the product catalog is a great way to showcase the types of product being offered and lead visitors to products they may be looking for. eBags.com‟s use of images as the major product categories (next page):
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