Website Structure Visualization

[brisray]

What usually drives my site redesigns is making the pages easier for visitors to find the various pages. Recently I've been thinking about website structure visualization and a comment by Yaha in the thread about Swatch Time reminded me of this.

Unless someone knows differently there are not many ways of doing this that look good, but here's some I know of:

Indented list - Something that I use for my own sitemap

Org Chart or Family Tree. These don't have to be done programmatically. The family tree I made was done using the free Dia drawing program

Linked scatter, bubble or sunburst graph - There's a lot of these around but a nice one can be seen on GitHub which needs Python installed.

Treemap

Useful tools for creating your own are site crawling tools like the one from Screaming Frog but I use the absolutely ancient Xenu Link Sleuth. These do not produce the graphs, but produce tables that show which pages link to the other pages.

mmm - I feel another new page for my own site should be made.

[IndigoGolem]

My site currently isn't very organized. I had plans at one point to arrange all the main pages (everything linked from the index) as CSS-animated planets moving around a sun that was a text-only list of links. The planets would link to renders of 3D scenes with links to smaller pages. I still have the pages i did this to up on my site (i'm changing how i link to my site so you have to find the page yourself). Not very practical, but it was fun to do on a small scale.