Lesson #22 The Site Map
Written By Titmowse

The bigger a website becomes, the harder it becomes for your visitors to navigate it. You want your site to live a long life with many expansions and updates. You want your site to grow but you still want it to be navigable.

Your adult website has elements such as privacy policies and contact information documents which are important to access but don’t exactly jive with the erotic atmosphere you’re attempting to portray on your adult page. Your older galleries and image sets are still on your server but are archived. You’ve got links on your domain, which don’t fit into the header or footer menus. You need to make a clean looking web but as a site owner, you’ve got enough to do. There are updates, email correspondence, traffic analysis and promotional campaigns to improve your sales ratios. You have to find a way to give surfers an overview of your adult web that’s easily updateable and universally recognizable by visitors. You need a site map.

What is a site map? A site map is pretty much what it sounds like. A site map is an outline of the links and sections of your adult domain. A site map is a very extensive and detailed menu for navigating the nether reaches of your adult domain. A site map keeps your potential customers from getting so lost on your web that they leave.

A site map can take various forms. Some sites display their maps as if they were file system trees. Others present a simple page with a list of text links to all public pages on their server. A site map can be a graphical image map or it can be a Java coded drop-down from a header toolbar. A webmaster could apply a link to the site map within a whole-site menu frame. On the other hand you could link to your site map on your main page only.

Your site map will contain all the links to all the pages you want your visitors to see. From Terms of Service pages to alternate links for older browsers, your site map will give the surfer an all-inclusive overview of your adult website. Your site map permits you to disclose every hyperlink to your visitors without cluttering up your design or turning off your shoppers. Title 18 information, contact information, advertising inquiries can all be linked from the site map. Searchers from the site map can locate old joke pages, old image sets or old galleries. A menu has five or four buttons that go to generalized sections of your web but a site map takes the surfer anywhere. The site map is the “You are here” beacon of a website, especially one with 30 pages or more.

It’s easy to create a site map. You don’t have to do anything fancy although some web designers create elaborate, interactive site maps. Yours can be a plain HTML page with a list of appropriate links within your domain. If you want to clarify a simple page even more, you can configure the text to an outline format or give it a table of content appearance. After you’ve created your site map, all you have to do is link to it on somewhere on your pages. Most put a site map link in the headers or footers of their main page. Even others include in their menu bars. You will name the link “Sitemap”.

Have you ever been on a big website and gotten lost, so lost in fact the "Home" button won’t help you? Look for the link that says "Site Map". It will tell you where you are and where you’ll find the link to your search. The site map will show you the entire contents of that huge Internet location and you’ll never be lost again. Now, imagine doing such a service for your surfers and realize this little thing could be the one thing that does the trick!

You can check out Cozy Academy's Site Map here!