The other day I posed about Task Maps and got some good interaction (good for this blog anyway

I was going to reply to the latest comment but decided to bring the discussion up here. I encourage you to read the post and comments about task maps, but you don’t have to. One posted that he felt you didn’t need to have a site map as a page as a part of a site.

Well, I wouldn’t go as far to say you shouldn’t have a site map. In fact, I think a site map should be on traditional sites (perhaps not a blog since archives are there).

A site map provides 2 things:

1. “Cheat” Search: a person, if they can’t find something, can use that to figure out where it could be. The better solution is to use a search engine, but not everyone has one (myself included on my main site…I want to fix that).
2. Helps Search Engines: many (most?) look for a sitemap. The reason is because it makes their job easier to index the entire site…especially if the sitemap is clean HTML links.

However, even if you don’t have a HTML page that is a site or task map, they are good documents for you to have to determine how to structure your site. That’s probably the bottom line. But for me, I’d want to have a site map for search (people & engines).