How do you visualize website structure

[DonnieCooper]

I second the smartdraw software.

I've been happy with it because you can do several other things with it.

[goodnewscowboy]

Hey Jos: I use a vector based drawing program (CorelDraw) and draw boxes with lines like you. I can highlight main pages by border thickness and colors.

It's probably not nearly as elegant as  Sameer's suggestions, but I've used it for so many years, it's as comfortable as a pair of old jeans

[Dan-Petrovic]

I have used PowerMapper and am relatively happy with it. It fails miserably on large scale websites. I've spent days researching website structure visualistion and found that there are no rubust industry strength solutions out there available to general community. We're in the process of writing our own software for that reason.

[NewBuilder]

Thanks Sameer, I will check these out.

[ninjamarketer]

Sure. Your welcome.

[ninjamarketer]

Great.Thanks

[MontanaFlynn83]

I'll use the mac software omnigraffle to chart out my site.  Also someone came up with a cool applescript that will take a regular xml sitemap and turn it into omnigraffle.

[NicoleMunoz]

Another vote for Smartdraw!

[semvibe]

I use Visio to start with and when I go in to more details in terms of pages, I use https://gomockingbird.com/

This allows me to share the drawings easily.

[MikeTek]

I'm a little late to the party (just trying out the new Q&A for the first time).

I was looking for a solution myself yesterday and found two free ones that, while definitely not as full-featured as those shared by ninjamarketer, might do the trick.

WriteMaps is a nifty tool (free to use) that looks to have some potential.

SlickMap is an HTML/CSS template you can use to add up to three levels of hierarchy, and it looks pretty sharp (though it's clearly not as quick/convenient as some of the other tools).

[elephantseo]

Smart Draw is seriously awesome; just downloaded for a 7 day free trial. I used Mockingbird in the past but SD looking way better now.

[bergman]

I checked out WriteMaps, and it was very very nice for small sites.  It is a pity that it does not seem to be maintained anymore.  Last communication from the creator seems to be from 2009.  

[bergman]

I checked out WriteMaps, and it was very very nice for small sites.  It is a pity that it does not seem to be maintained anymore.  Last communication from the creator seems to be from 2009.  

[MikeTek]

I hadn't noticed that - shame, could have been interesting if they kept up development.

[Lumin]

You might want to check out this link, which works for new versions of Omigraffe.

Let me know what you think.

[NickPateman81]

Apart from everything mentioned already - bubbl.us is a great free online tool that lets you save and export your visualisations.

[Pavlicko]

I like using post-its, but that can get ridiculous as well. Here is one of my faves for mind-mapping, and it's completely free: https://bubbl.us -

[NewBuilder]

Thanks Nick, really handy, appreciate it.

[voitenkos]

ProtoShare.com is the best tool of that kind for me

[dephelis]

I'm currently using a combination of (mainly free) apps to map my company's website to visualise link flow and indentify isolated content that hasn't been correctly linked in.

I start with a site crawl using Xenu's Link Sleuth from which I can export a list of all pages as well as a list of all the links. I import the two lists into Excel where the data gets cleaned and additional information extracted by a macro.  The final step is to import the link and page data in Cytoscape which performs the visualisation.

Don't be fooled by the biological focus of Cytoscape, it will work with any data as long as it's broken down into nodes (pages) and edges (links). It incorporates a number of visualisation algorithms, and allows you to filter a selection of nodes which can then be copied to a subnetwork and visualised separately.

It handles our small site of 2k pages and 50k internal links with ease, and I know a geneticist who uses it to map networks of over 7k genes with some 300k interactions.

If you're interested, I can provide a copy of the spreadsheet I use for manipulating the raw Xenu data.

1. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

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