A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

1) Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

2) Conveying your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.

3) Site optimization purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone.

Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

People wonder what the next ginormous step in tech is going to be. My money is on inventory search of every store. What needs to happen for this to become reality? RFID. Interoperability between inventory systems.

Lots of stuff you’re never going to buy online (groceries; the Target run). But if you’re searching for some obscure item, you should be able to go on Google and locate the stores closest to you that have that item, in real time. (Think how much time this would save in trying to hopscotch from store to store to find that perfect gift.)

When you think of it, most of Web 2.0 is a presentation layer above the existing, a way to rate/save/share/remix existing products. ECommerce is an option over and above bricks and mortar. What is the Web doing to change things at the product layer?

AOL just announced that Netscape Navigator, the browser that launched the commercial Internet in October 1994, and that they acquired in November 1998 as part of their Netscape Communications Corp. acquisition deal for $4.2 billion, will die on February 1, 2008.

Netscape Navigator is currently at version 9. Recent surveys suggest that Netscape currently has only 0.6% market share among browsers, compared to Internet Explorer’s 77.35% and Firefox’s 16.01%. This is down from more than 90 percent of the market in the 90s, when the browser wars began, then the Microsoft antitrust trial took place, before IE took over as leading browser.

To me Netscape Navigator died a long time ago, the last version that counted was somewhere around version 4.5 or 4.7; everything went downwards from there on for Netscape as a browser.

Still, we mustn’t forget the success of the Mozilla foundations and its projects, like the Firefox browser, which spun off of Netscape in February 1998. The legacy of Netscape will live on through Mozilla’s projects.

So, again, support for existing versions of Netscape Navigator will cease on February 1, 2008. A cool thing AOL will be doing though is setting up an archive where people will be able to download older versions of Netscape, without any support.

Rest in peace Netscape Navigator, you can rest assured your role in internet history will never be forgotten.

Think Secret, one of the popular websites among Apple enthusiasts, is no more.

Exactly three years ago, Think Secret published rumors that Apple is building some new Macs and a word processor.

The rumors turned out to be true when Steve Jobs announced the new Mac Mini and iWork at the Macworld.

Think Secret was subsequently sued by Apple for publishing trade secrets and getting information from sources who violated their confidentiality agreements with Apple.

Now both Apple and Think Secret have reached a settlement that the Apple rumor website will no longer be published.