HTML Sitemaps Guide

Beyond Standard HTML/CSS Sitemaps

If you want to take your HTML/CSS sitemaps a step further, here is how to create visual sitemaps just by following these 4 steps in A1 Sitemap Generator:

1. Crawl your website in the sitemap generator tool. Wait till done.
2. Select the visual sitemap preset you want to use. This loads both sitemap template code and options.
3. After loading the preset, edit the sitemap template code to match your website. (Optional.)
4. Build, test and upload your new visual website sitemap.

Here is a screenshot showing the sitemap template load/save system:

Visual Sitemaps Supported in Sitemap Generator

While you can always edit the HTML/CSS template code and options yourself to create your own unique visual sitemap, built-in support is included for some visual sitemap types. (Including presets for more is planned.) These are:

• SlickMap

  

• CSSsitemap

  

Together with the official release of A1 Sitemap Generator 3 some new videos have been produced.

The first of these was recently shown at sitemaps generator blog. It’s a general make sitemaps introduction video showing how to crawl websites, create XML and HTML sitemaps, FTP upload etc.

At the ISV Company blog it has now been announced that a new version of Microsys sitemap generator tool has been released.

While the 2.3 version release is focused on improving filtering and sorting of URLs found during website crawls, its HTML sitemap tools have been continuously improved “behind-the-scenes” throughout the 2.x series.

If your website does not have a HTML sitemap, now is the time to create it. Then start experimenting using the HTML sitemap template system, so the finished sitemap looks exactly like your existing website layout

In this tutorial we will use A1 Sitemap Generator to create our HTML sitemaps. The program has many options and can handle large websites. We will keep to default options, and only briefly discuss some of the advanced sitemapper settings.

Scan your website for pages
Before you can create a HTML sitemap, you will need to scan your website through for pages. A1 Sitemap Generator offers lots of options for crawler and output filters, robots.txt, no-follow and no-index, login authentication etc. However, you can ignore all those settings for most websites! You only need to fill in the path to your website and press start scan, that’s it!

Link check your entire website
When the scan has finished, you get an outline of your website with details for all pages. The website validation and link checker tools can help you solve various problems. When you are done, click the Create sitemap tab.

Ready to create the HTML sitemap
Select template sitemap and press the build sitemap button. Default template settings generates a valid HTML sitemap. However, you can create your own XHTML or HTML template if you wish. You can also adjust how the HTML sitemap generator builds the HTML sitemap, e.g. control max number of links per sitemap page, columns layout to use, anchor text generation etc.

View your HTML sitemap
After you have created your HTML site map, you can view the source code generated. There are also various shortcuts so you can view the generated site map files in different browsers.