How do you visualize website structure

[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

kJyKm.jpg

[NickPateman81]

This sounds like a great idea. I'm certainly interested in seeing how you handle the Xenu data if you're willing to share!

[dephelis]

Glad to.

I'm in the middle of rewriting the macro at the moment as my first attempt was a tad on the slow side. I can skype it across to you when I finish it (today or tomorrow).

[DaveSottimano]

You can also download a trial of Black Widow - http://download.cnet.com/1770-20_4-0-.html?query=black+widow&searchtype=downloads&tag=opensearch

Once you've scanned a site, it builds a site architecture that looks like Windows Explorer. You can take screen shots and place them in your documents as needed.

[Ontarioseo]

Damien, I'd be interested in taking a look at this as well, if you're OK sending it over to me. We used to use a profiler program that now seems to be dead.

[Marcus_Miller]

Open Office Draw is free and has a series of flow chart icons but it's a manual job and takes a bit of getting used to (price is right though). Anything like this falls apart for larger sites though as you would be there all week.

Would love to know if there is a firm favourite amongst people as it's certainly helpful to visualise interlinking and structure.

[dlrPaul]

Pidoco is a smart collaborative wireframe / GUI design tool. Could be worth a look. Alternatively if you're looking for free, Gliffy is good.

[dannypenrose]

I'm a big fan of Smart draw but just recently had a colleague share a chart with me via Google Docs which appeared to work very well for creating a flow chart and mapping out site structure.

[firstconversion]

I print it out and lay it out on a large table in the office. Just seeing it visually lets me get to grips with it a lot easier than scrolling through unconnected pages on a screen.

Print small and get a big table and you can fit a large sitemap there Get a lot of A4s and some scissors and tape and you will be surprised how much better your understanding is by the time you've finished

[swissseo]

Online-Tool diagramly (free) You can Save it as XML, JPG, PNG and SVG.
Or Lovely Charts (not free), but you can put in text-Sitemaps for a "Autovisualisation".

[katjaka]

I played around with Cytoscape and I'd definitely be interested of the spreadsheet as well!

[PopTop]

DYNO Mapper is great at visualizing a website's structure. It is the best Sitemap Generator that I have used because it also performs a content audit and includes Google Analytics integration. It's pretty sweet how you can sort and filter pages based on Google Analytics metrics. If you are looking for a great discovery and planning tool I would give it a try.

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