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tutorials:site_map:start

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Creating a Site Map For Your Site

This can be problematic with dynamic sites where the content is constantly changing. Within your classified ad and auction sites listings are constantly being inserted, expired and closed. This makes static site map pages obsolete almost at the time they are created if done by outside software. We have resisted the temptation to create a "site map" of all current listings on the site as this can be quite a task for the software to create at once and can be too much of a draw on the site and overload some database servers on high traffic sites.

To stop your site map visitors (ie search engines) from missing your latest content and getting errors when they try to visit your site map page we suggest creating a page on your site that contains category links. If you wish to create this "within" your Geo software one of the extra pages available in your software as a site map should do as a start. Using an extra page makes sure that page has access to modules within the system. You may create a specific page template for this page if you wish or you can modify any of the current page templates you not using within the system. You then need to do one of two things. You will either need to insert a category navigation module within the main content area of that page template or using HTML manually create a list of links to all of your categories of your site.

If you choose to use a category navigation module please note that you can set that module to display subcategories also. Using this solution will be able to automatically display the top two levels of categories within your site. If you have only two levels of categories this should display them all but if not you may consider the other option described further below. You can set the category counts to display within the module as well. For further control of how the subcategories are displayed you can consult the category navigation modules documentation within this wiki [/admin_menu/page_modules/browsing/category_navigation/start#individual_controls_within_the_category_navigation_modules|here].

If you decide to manually create links to each of the categories you want within the site map you will not be able to display the category counts next to each category but you can possibly be more comprehensive in the categories you display if you have more than 2 levels of categories. This option gives you more control over how categories are displayed and which categories are displayed if you do not wish to display them all.

We suggest using categories links within your site map page because once set in the software category links do not change unless you delete or add new categories within the admin tool. You should be able to find more information about creating those category links manually using HTML [|here].

tutorials/site_map/start.1247593987.txt.gz · Last modified: 2014/09/25 16:55 (external edit)