Generating a Visual Site Map of an Existing Site [closed]

Question

I thought I could easily answer this question by searching the web, but my Google-fu has failed me. So I turn to you, oh mighty stackoverflowers, and beseech you for enlightenment:

What is the quickest and best way to generate a visual site map (e.g. flowchart, mind map, IA diagram) of an existing website?

Additional context: my client has been asked by their client to redesign their website. The art directors understandably asked for information on the current site architecture, to which the client had nothing(!). So they have asked me to automagically produce a visual site map by somehow crawling the client's site.

I have found various free/shareware apps that do this, but have been unable to find reviews or best practices. I'd prefer to make a robust recommendation rather than grab the first shareware app that seems to do the trick. So, how would you recommend generating a visual site map?

Much appreciated!

Heraldry

this will do everything you seek and more: VisualSitemaps.com VisualFlows.io – Dysprosium

Answer 1

It's not free, but Visio has a web site map diagram type that will go spider a site and generate a nice pretty diagram of the results.

Nurse

Answer 2

Here's a solution that suggests using either XML Sitemaps or Google Sitemap Generator along with AppleScript and OmniGraffle.

Monagan

Answer 3

update time. Both Visio & OmniGraffle w/ sitemap are good solutions. In the end, the client found that those applications by themselves produced too much granular information to be useful. For example, if a site has 30 product pages, each with their own overview, specifications, and documents sections the tree gets very big indeed. I solved for this by taking the sitemap and scrubbing it in Excel first to eliminate redundancies, and then generating the sitemap. A bit time-consuming but worth it in the end.

Thanks!

Heraldry

Answer 4

the only good tool i found is powermapper. It allows you to hide irrelevant portinons from your visual sitemap, and provides quite a few templates.

Amadeo

Answer 5

In order to visualize site map as a flowchart, you can use Site Visualizer software. It has 30-days full-featured trial period, so you can create visual map of any existing website absolutely for free.

After installation, create new project, type website URL you need to crawl, then lick Start tool button. After the crawling will be done, click Draw button on the Visual Sitemap tab. When the visualization will be drawn, you can highlight links of any page by clicking on its rectangle. Outboind links with rel="nofollow" attribute draws with dotted line:

Click on Save button in order to save the visual sitemap to an image file: PNG, JPG, BMP, etc. More info you can find at the Quick Start Guide.

Serif

Unfortunately, this tool does not appear to work in scenarios where a login is required... – Bunsen

Answer 6

This is an open-source project that I worked on to handle this exact situation with my clients.

Callis

Does this project automatically crawl the website and build the map? – Kassia

It does not. It's more of a manual planning or visualization tool. – Callis