Spruced-Up Site Maps

by Kim Siever

67 Reader Comments

Back to the Article
  1. Peter Müller;

    “The menu has been tested in Mozilla, Safari, Netscape, IE and Opera and works fine in all.”


    Not in MY copy of Safari it doesn’t; your folders do not expand or retract, and the RHS column of pretty icons extends past the end of its “containing” white rectangle on many sub-pages.

    On further investigation, the expand and contract is in fact not functional in firefox (windows) either, and in IE 6 the whole sitemap is bumped down below the LHS navigation, and the folders still don’t collapse.

    Comments about “glass houses” come immediately to mind…

    Caveat: I just realised that maybe you removed the script you were talking about? if not, oh dear…

    Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
  2. I’ve had a similar situation on my intranet for about a year now. Except that I have a class on the ul called iconbullet, and then on the child li’s I have classes that show different icons based on their type, i.e. folder (for parents), url, pdf, xls, etc…

    Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
  3. I think sprucing up a site map is the right thing to do. Most people treat the site map as a necessary device but treat it as it doesn’t belong in the website.

    You never know who will be looking at your sites. I say be proud of every page.

    Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
  4. Site maps are an important aspect of general UI design for the web and for Intranet/Extranet development. I believe that it may be one of the most important pages next to the actual home page.

    And I digress with regards to my comments about the code cops in a previous post. It does, indeed, require criticism to move forward and learn. My remarks were intended to incite constructive critique as opposed to rip and tear. “Let me share my findings and point out the differences,” works much better than “I did this same thing a few years back and yours doesn’t work in Safari.” ;)

    Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
  5. What do you tell on this site-map/ul style?
    Sorry for czech lang of site.

    http://www.pcsp.cz/mapa-serveru.php

    Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
  6. Simple pre-loading such as:

          window.onload = function () {
            var imagesArray = new Array(‘images/image1.jpg’,‘images/image2.jpg’);
            preloadImages(imagesArray);
          }
     
          function preloadImages(imagesArray) {
            for(var loop = 0; loop < imagesArray.length; loop++){
              var preloadedImage = new Image();
              preloadedImage.src = imagesArray[loop];
            }

    … will solve the problem where the “little file icon” takes a while to load when hovering over it for the first time.

    Merely add all the images used in the hover effect to the array called “imagesArray” in the JavaScript above and away you go!

    Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
  7. I always thought sitemaps were for search engines.  This actually makes a sitemap navigable by a human.  Very cool.

    Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.