A sitemap can be considered unnecessary in the process of building a website, if you’re making one just for the sake of having one. Enumerated below are the importances of having a well constructed sitemap, that you will be able to tailor to suit your own needs:

1) Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

2) Conveying your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.

3) Site optimization purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

It is most important to consider the size of a website in implementing a sitemap, given the above reasoning. This way, you will be able to make your website neatly organized for everyone’s easy access.

It may be hard to believe, but it’s a fact that there are still a number of users running on good old dialup, even though more and more subscribers are using and switching to broadband every year. It would therefore be wise to count these people in the equation when designing your website with the very major consideration for the loading time of your website. Dialup users or not, visitors appreciate it when a site loads quickly which gives them time to navigate the pages at the minimum loading time possible.

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly images on your website, which are larger in size. It is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.

You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.

If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the “quality” of the JPEG image — normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image’s file size.

PNG or Portable Network Graphic format, on the other hand, can get you the best quality at the least file size. Then there’s the option to save your images in GIF format — the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. The downside in saving in GIF format is that it will, more often than not, compromise the appearance of your image, so be sure to make your choice wisely!