Xtreeme SiteXpert Help - Site map Creation Process

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Site map Creation Process

The first step in the creation process is Layout Wizard (either choose 'Create a new site map using Layout Wizard' from the Welcome Dialog or click on the 'Layout Wizard' button on the tool bar). Layout Wizard will build the layout of your site map automatically by scanning your web site for files. It offers three different approaches:

Navigation mode - This mode will resemble the navigational structure of your site. You will be asked to select a base HTML file. Layout Wizard will scan this file (and then recursively all the linked files) for links and build a default layout based on the structure of the links found during the search.

File structure mode (works only with a local copy of a website) - In this mode the default layout will be identical to the file and directory structure of the site.

XML mode (available only in Professional edition) - Layout Wizard will create layout based on an XML file. This mode is necessary if you want to create a sitemap from a source other than HTML structure. For example, this can be data exported from a database or another application.

Click here to go to a detailed description of Layout Wizard

When Layout Wizard finishes you are left with a layout tree that reflects the layout of your web site. Item labels are by default equal to file descriptions. File description is defined as:

description placed between SiteXpert-specific <SX-DESCRIPTION> and </SX-DESCRIPTION> tags. These tags should be placed inside a comment, e.g:
<TITLE>page title</TITLE>
title of the page if <SX-DESCRIPTION> tag is not present (note: title of the page can come from a few sources; you will find out more in Navigation mode of Layout Wizard)
file name if neither is found

You may also use a powerful tool called Suffix Builder to have Layout Wizard change descriptions in an intelligent way.

You may now change the layout by rearranging, adding or removing items or changing item properties.

Click here to go to a detailed description of the layout view.

When you're done setting the layout you should set options of the output HTML file(s). It is very likely that you will want the site map to be part of an existing web page. With SiteXpert you don't need to manually combine these two files together. You may embed site maps created by SiteXpert into your exisiting web page by creating a template file out of this page. An alternative approach would be to have SiteXpert create include files (.inc) which you can include into your existing HTML pages using any inclusion method (such as SSI, PHP, ASP, or ColdFusion). You can either tell SiteXpert to create include files in Options / Output or by using Web Site Navigation Manager

Click here to go to a detailed description of site map options