A Semi-Dynamic Sitemap with XML, JavaScript & CSS Part One

There are many ways to create a sitemap, beginning with sitting down the good old fashioned way with nothing but notepad and some ideas.  But this method can take time to initially code and can be a real pain to update and maintain.  You could buy a piece of software to do it for you, there are plenty of them out there and some of them can do the job quite competently.  What these applications normally do is locate your websites root directory and then spider all of the pages within them before outputting a pre-configured HTML page. 


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All good in theory, but the problem is that the HTML usually outputted by these applications is a long way from standards-compliant or Search Engine Friendly (SEF), plus you have to actually purchase them, which for a decent one is probably going to be in the $50 to $100 range.  If you have a dynamically served site that relies on databases and server-side code, you can also write (or otherwise obtain) code that spiders your site and generates a sitemap completely automatically. 

This is a good method to use if you have a database driven site but could be considered over-kill if you have a relatively small site and again, you may have to pay for the code that makes it happen.  All of these options have their good and bad points, but there is another method that you can use which takes the best of each of the previously mentioned methods and combines them to form a method of sitemap generation that works well in all situations.

Dan Wellman

Dan WellmanDan Wellman is an author and web developer based in the UK. Dan has written three books so far; the latest, jQuery UI 1.7: The User Interface Library for jQuery, was released at the end of 2009.

Dan has been writing web development tutorials for over 5 years and works by day for a local digital media agency in his home town of Southampton.

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