I found your article while doing a search about sitemaps, so I figured I’d see what your take on it is.
I work at an agency that does small business websites, some as small as 5 or 6 pages, like an online brochure. I know sitemaps are useful, and help with SEO, but it’s part of our standard design to put text links to each page in the footer of each page. I think a sitemap page with 5 links on it is kind of silly, and a waste of space. Should we continue with the sitemaps or do the footer links suffice in those cases?
Thanks a ton!
I agree. Sitemaps are really useful when there is a lot of content in a web site – if you have a really simple site, it is probably overkill.
In the following video I answer this question and more importantly, I go into the broader issue of the importance of learning the code behind the web pages – HTML and CSS:
Trying to build websites without a good understanding of HTML and CSS is like petting your cat’s fur the wrong way … it’s a recipe for disaster!
This is interesting news for web designers as it seems Safari is even getting traction in the Windows world:
Apple said Friday that more than 11 million copies of its new Safari 4 web browser have been downloaded in the first three days of its release, including more than six million downloads by users of Microsoft’s Windows operating systems.
Some interesting points about the new Safari 4:
– It uses the Nitro JavaScript engine that executes Javascript code several times faster than IE 8 or Firefox 3.
– Safari (according to Apple) renders HTML three times faster than Firefox 3 or IE 8.
And for Mac users, this is an interesting point:
With the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard this September, Safari will run as a 64-bit application, boosting the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 percent, Apple claims.
Besides the speed improvements, Safari 4 has some really cool features like the Topsites feature that basically gives you a large thumbnail preview of recently viewed web pages.
In the following video, I go over the two basic ways to insert video into your web pages:
1. Using a site like Youtube.
2. Embedding the videos directly using a Flash video player.
I also get into the video formats you can use to embed video in a website:
1. Flash FLV
2. H.264
3. Quicktime video
4. Windows WMV
For details and pro’s and con’s, watch the video:
As you probably noticed, I am using Youtube to deliver this video as part of an ongoing experiment. If you can’t see the video, it is probably because your work place is blocking Youtube. Let me know and I will release another copy of the video on the killersites.com servers.
