Sitemap

Whilst you may be extremely familiar with the structure of your site, all of its available pages and their relationship to each other it may not be that obvious to a visitor. A site map can therefore be very useful.

It also accords with the general trend towards good quality "accessibility". See http://www.w3.org/WAI/ for more on this.

It will not do you any harm with helping robots trawl your site and potentially aid your ranking.

Regards

Is this a question about beginners CSS? Feel free to ask such questions but please select an appropriate forum section such as Off Topic for them.

Moving thread.

css-helper,

Would I use a free sitemap builder like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ or would I create it in dreamweaver using a list and then linking to that url?

Not sure how to go about this.

You should be fine starting with that site. Good luck.

css-helper,

Making sure I understand this correctly, I would after completing my site upload it to its url and then generate a xml code via the xml-sitemaps website. I would then create a new page in dreamweaver and save it as a sitemap.xml page and copy & paste the code generated from xml-sitemaps.

The part I'm not 100% sure of is how to then create a html page that represents the sitemap xml file.

example:

or

Do I just make a new html page in dreamweaver and add each page as text and then link them?

Yes, pretty much as you said. The xml-sitemaps site creates an xml file for use by robots. For human visitors you are then creating a standard (X)HTML page generally using

's nested as necessary to reflect your site.

You can take the xml file and alter that to turn it into a standard (X)HTML page or just start afresh depending on your skill level and/or the size and complexity of your site.

And a final thought from someone who has been there: the sooner you ditch Dreamweaver the sooner you will start to learn (and learn rapidly) how to work directly with HTML and CSS code.

Please don't pursue this thought on this thread: there's plenty of material on existing threads on this site or elsewhere on the web to explain the dis-benefits of using Dreamweaver and other so say WYSIWYG editors.

Good luck. Regards

XML sitemaps are for search engines only and shouldn't really be thought of when creating a sitemap page on your site. The structure of the two will be the same but that's where the similarity ends really.

Thanks heaps guys, your instructions have made it very clear.