Why You Need A Sitemap

Quite often, sitemaps are considered useless in the process of building a website, and this is true if you put one up without knowing why. By emphasizing the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to adjust your own sitemap in order to suit your own needs.

1) Navigation

Quite literally, a sitemap acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browse your site and get a bit lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always click to your sitemap to find out where they are. This will enable them to navigate through your pages with more ease.

2) Communicating your site’s theme

When your visitors arrive on your sitemap, they will get a good idea of your site’s theme in no time. Therefore, there won’t be any need to get the idea of your site by reading through each page. This will help your visitor to save time.

3) Site optimization

With the creation of a sitemap, you will actually be creating a single page which will contain links to every single page on your site. So when a search engine robot hit this page, they will automatically follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site will get indexed! It is for this purpose too that a link to the sitemap will have to be placed quite prominently on the homepage of your website.

4) Relevance Organization

Finally, a sitemap enables your visitors and yourself to get a complete bird’s eye view of the structure of your site, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to consider the existing hierarchy just by looking carefully at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a site which is perfectly organized with everything sorted according to their relevance.

Bearing in mind the above points, it will be even more important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a big size. Through the use of a sitemap, you will be able to maintain your website as an easily accessible and neatly organized area for everyone.


James Reid is contributing editor at WebDesignArticles.net. This article may be reproduced provided that its complete content, links and author byline are kept intact and unchanged. No additional links permitted. Hyperlinks and/or URLs must remain both human clickable and search engine spiderable.

Principles for Good Web Design

Your website is where your business is – it is like the location of an offline company. Therefore, it is crucial to make use of good design principles in order to ensure that your site reaches out to the maximum amount of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Try to make sure that you have clear directions on your website’s navigation. The navigation menu should be neat, tidy and concise so that visitors know how to navigate through your website without any confusion.

Try to reduce the amount of images which are present on your website, as they will make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are quite unnecessary. If you think any image on your site is essential, try to make sure that you optimize them by using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Try to maintain your text paragraphs to a length which is reasonable. If a paragraph is too long, you should divide it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks won’t be too big. This is crucial due to the fact that a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading any of your content.

Try to make sure that your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure that they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose many potential visitors.

Try to avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is most necessary. Make use of scripting languages in order to handle or manipulate data, but not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and might even crash some browsers. Also, scripts aren’t supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss on some important information due to this.

Try to use CSS in order to style your page content as they can save you a lot of work through the styling of all elements on your website in one go.


J. M. Stevens is contributing editor at WebDesignArticles.net. This article may be reproduced provided that its complete content, links and author byline are kept intact and unchanged. No additional links permitted. Hyperlinks and/or URLs must remain both human clickable and search engine spiderable.