NOVEMBER TUTOR ¢
VISUALISE YOUR SITE
VISUALISE
YOUR SITE
Designing a great Web site is just the start of an ongoing process of Web site manage-
ment. Build it and they may come, but to keep them coming back you cannot afford lost
links and orphaned Web pages. If you find yourself in this position, help is at hand with
Visio 2000 Professional Edition’s Web Site Map add-on.
o you’ve created this killer Web
S site, full of information and lots
of links. Yo u ’ re ecstatic about
how it turned out and everyone
who looks at it tells you how great it is.
Once the excitement dies down, the real-
isation hits you that somehow you’re go-
ing to have to manage this site. After all,
from the huge sites of major international
corporations down to your personal Web
site about the life cycles of your pet slug,
every site needs to be monitored and man-
aged to make the most of your presence on
the Internet. Dropped links, lost pages and
old content sound the death knell for any
Web site.
Visio 2000 Professional Edition gives you
a powerful tool to help you with this task:
the Web Site Map add-on. This standard op-
tion for Visio 2000 Professional auto-
matically maps any Web site you point it at
and then gives you a graphical represen-
tation of the site, complete with informa-
tion about every page, link and detail it
found.
WHAT WEB SITE MAPPING DOES
The Web site mapper is a crawler (a pro-
gram that searches for and indexes Web
98 November 2000
pages) similar to the famous Internet search
services, but instead of indexing the entire
Web, it indexes a single Web site. It starts
at the Web page you point it to and in-
dexes all linked pages below that, down to
the level of links you specify. The mapper
makes a temporary database containing
every link from the pages as well as every
graphic, audio, movie and scripting file.
Then it creates a Visio graphical element for
each one and lays these out on the Visio
drawing page, interlocked the way they
would be on an organisational chart.
The crawler is searching through the
HTML code of every page for standard link
references like HREF and SRC, and then
looking for the referenced file. If the crawler
doesn’t find the file, it assumes the link is
broken and displays the link as such.
You can specify types of files and links
to have the Web site mapper look for, or
you can let it find everything on the page.
Once you have all the information on the
Visio page, you can use the map any way
you like, including adding it to other doc-
uments about your Web site.
MAPPING A WEB SITE
Creating a basic Web site map is quick and
www.DITnet.co.ae
easy using the Web Site Map tool. First,
open up Visio 2000 Professional and start
a new Web Site Map document by select-
ing File | New | Internet diagram | Web
Site Map from the menu. The resulting di-
alog (Figure 1) prompts you for the ad-
dress of the Web site you want to map.
Make sure you have access to the Web site
you want—you’ll need to have an active In-
ternet connection unless you’re mapping
a site that exists on your hard drive or net-
work.
You’ll also need to select the number of
levels the crawler will search down (the de-
fault is 5) and how many total links it will
investigate before stopping (the default is
500). The One Level check box lets you
override the Maximum number of levels
option to give you a quick diagram of the
Web site. Keep in mind that the total num-
ber of links determines the total number of
shapes on the Visio drawing page.
When you click OK, the Web Site Map
tool starts mapping the Web site. You’ll see
i n f o rmat io n ab out ea ch pag e be in g
mapped as it works (Figure 2). When the
process is finished, Visio lays out the link
and object information it found on your Vi-
sio drawing page (Figure 6, page 100).
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ADVANCED SITE MAPPING
The default options of Web site
mapping make for a pretty excit-
ing site management tool, but there
are lots more advanced options to
help you get the information you
need about your Web site.
One thing to make sure of before
you start any new map is that you
have a completely clean Vi s i o
page. It’s usually easier to just start
a whole new Web Site Map docu-
ment each time you map a site.
Create a new Web Site Map doc-
ument as described earlier, and
then click the Options ... button
in the resulting dialog. This gives
you the Links and Advanced tabs,
with which you can change the
crawler settings (Figure 3). By de-
fault, the mapper looks for every
standard kind of link found on the
Web page. The Links tab lets you
specify the ones you’re interested
in. This can be helpful when you
just want HTML page links, or
when you are trying to sort out a
linking problem (when your image
links aren’t working, for example).
Before you can turn anything on
or off, you’ll need to deselect the
All Links option. Once you turn
that option off, you can select or
deselect different types of files.
You can also use this tab to add
nonstandard file types, such as
those you’ve developed yourself.
When you check the Duplicate
links box, your diagram shows all
the links from each page, even
those that appear more than once
on a page. This option is usually
checked, but it can return a huge
number of links if you have used
a link many times—a tiny graphic
that’s used as a bullet in a long list,
for example. So you may want to
turn this option off to avoid un-
necessary clutter on your diagram.
The Links on a remote site check
box shows the connections from
your site to external sites. By de-
fault, this box is checked. Visio
gives you a shape for every page
you link to on remote sites of any
kind, but it does not investigate
the remote page’s own links, even
if the page is well within the level
limit you set in the first window. Vi-
sio ignores links to other sites when
you uncheck this box.
The Advanced tab (Figure 4)
gives you even more power for
specifying what you want to ap-
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¢ NOVEMBER TUTOR
VISUALISE YOUR SITE
pear in your diagram. You can Figure 1: The
identify which code triggers the Generate Site
Map dialog box
mapping tool will look for and tell appears when
the tool to ignore others as it sifts you start a new
through your HTML. By default all Web Site Map.
the triggers (such as HREF and Here you tell
Visio what to
SRC) are set to create links and map.
consequently shapes in your dia-
gram. You can tell Web site map-
ping to ignore any of the triggers Figure 2: Visio
it’s programmed to find. The map- displays this
dialog to show
per is set to find links based on you its progress
HREF, SRC, BACKGROUND, AC- while mapping
TION, CODEBASE and CODE your site.
commands. It finds and separate-
ly identifies each type of link, such
as MAILTO:, and assigns an icon
based on that type.
On the Advanced tab, you can
also add or completely remove
code triggers from the list of choic-
es, which determine what HTML
tags will generate a page shape on
Figure 3: This
the map. Using the Add or Remove Options dialog
buttons, you can indicate a differ- is accessed
ent set of triggers. Removing a trig- from a button
ger isn’t generally necessary, but on the Generate
Site Map dialog
adding triggers can make this help- box. Use the
ful tool even more useful if you Links tab to tell
have unique tags in the pages Visio what kind
you’re trying to track. of files to
include on the
Just as with the basic site map, map.
when you are done with the more
advanced setting options, click OK
until you are back to the main win-
dow and then run the Web site
mapping tool.
PRINTING SITE MAPS
If you have even a modest Web Figure 4: Use
site, it’s easy to have more shapes the Advanced
than you really want on one draw- tab to control
ing page. For a large Web site, the which HTML
attributes
several hundred or several thou- should trigger
sand shapes can become totally the creation of
unmanageable. Fortunately, Visio a shape.
provides some special layout tools
to help you deal with the prob-
lem.
There are several layout options,
and you need to know how you
want the diagram to look before
you can choose one. By default,
the links are laid out as you would
expect to see them on an organi- Figure 5: The
Lay Out Shapes
sational chart. For most Web sites, dialog is
this generates a very short, wide accessed from
document, looking something like the Tools menu;
a long strip of paper. If your site it lets you
change the way
meets this description, you prob- your link sym-
ably want to choose a different bols are organ-
layout. There are three styles: Ra- ised.
dial, Flowchart/Tree (the default)
and Circular. You access these by
November 2000 99
NOVEMBER TUTOR ¢
Figure 6: Here’s a Visio Web Site Map showing the shapes for HTML pages, images and scripts.
choosing Tools | Lay Out Shapes (see Fig-
ure 5).
Radial is great for Web sites with lots of
back links—links that go back and forth
among pages on the same level. Flowchart
is good for Web sites that have a very top-
down structure, such as those in which the
only back links go to the home page. Circular
is best for sites that have complicated link
structures, or for Web sites that have links to
all pages from all pages.
In the Lay Out Shapes window, you can
also choose how the lines that connect the
VISUALISE YOUR SITE
shapes behave (using the Connectors op-
tions), and how the shapes appear on the
drawing page. By selecting to align the
shapes with the grid, you let Visio help you
arrange the diagram. The last option, En-
large Page To Fit Drawing, should always be
selected. That way, you can be assured that
you will always be able to print the whole
diagram.
Most Web site maps will be too large to
show reasonably on one page. This means
you’ll either want to shrink the diagram
(which may make it unreadable) or move
some of the links to other pages. Go back to
the drawing page and right click on a Web
page shape that has pages linked below it.
Choose Make Subpage. Visio moves that
Web page and all its corresponding links to
a new, standard size page. The new page has
a copy of the Web page shape that the moved
page links to, and an arrow you can double
click on to get back to the main map; these
help you keep track of the interrelation-
ships.
Moving Web page shapes and links to new
pages usually gives you a far more man-
ageable diagram—one that will print easily
across pages and that gives you shapes you
can read. If you do not want to move shapes
to new pages, you can always print the doc-
ument as it is; Visio will automatically tile the
diagram to print across several pages. All of
this gets a lot easier if you have a printer that
can handle larger sizes of paper.
MANAGING SITES WITH SITE MAPS
Visio 2000 Professional’s Web site mapping
tool creates a visual representation of a Web
site of any size, but the map is just a pretty
picture unless you use it. You must under-
stand how the links are made and what they
mean. You can alter the site, using the in-
formation on the site map to fix broken links,
and you can alter the relationships of pages.
Above all, it means using the map to make
your Web site better and more manageable.