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Create a Visual Sitemap

avatar of Kira Hartley

Kira Hartley

Last updated

Sitemaps are helpful for SEO and for giving your community an overview of your site's structure and content. They show the relationship between pages and are simple and easy to understand.

Visual sitemaps are also valuable, as they show you the majority of pages on your site and their order and hierarchy in a straightforward list. Sitemaps are easy to create using the plugin tool in a WYSIWYG Editor.

Visual sitemaps differ from a sitemap submitted to a search engine because they do not provide information to search engines. A visual sitemap is just a representation of the pages on your site. 

Am example of a visual sitemap

How to Create a Sitemap

Sitemaps are best created on an OC General page and linked from your site's sub-footer.

  1. Right-click in your site tree where you want to create the sitemap.
  2. Select Create Page, then choose OC General as the content type.
  3. Change the Page name, Page title, and summary field to indicate the page's purpose.
  4. Open the WYSIWYG Editor and add any introductory content that you need. You may also need to add a brief sentence or two about the sitemap.
  5. Select InsertPlugin from the WYSIWYG Toolbar.
    the insert plugin tool in the toolbar
  6. Select OC Nav Public Sitemap from the plugin drop-down menu.
  7. Select Save Content and Close to exit the WYSIWYG Editor, then Publish your page when you've finished.

Your sitemap will automatically update as you create pages for your site, as long as those pages are not hidden from navigation. We recommend you also hide your sitemap page from navigation and external search. To do this, go to the Settings tab and check the boxes for Hide this page from navigation menus and Hide this page from external search engine.

After you've created your sitemap, you'll need to link it to your sub footer so your community can access it from any page on your site.

Update Your Sitemap Sub-footer Link

When we create your site, we will also make the structure of your footer. To update your sitemap sub-footer link:

  1. Navigate to your Site Footer folder in the site tree and open the Sub Footer Links folder.
  2. Select the Sitemap OC Footer Link page and select Update to put in a work-in-progress stage.
    the sitemap footer link in the site tree
  3. Under the Add link URL field, select Insert links and use the content selector to navigate to your sitemap page.
  4. Select Save, and change any other details for the page.
  5. Publish your OC Footer Link page.
  6. Check your live site to make sure the link is operational.

What Else?

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