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This is very much a page under development. What I mean by that is that I've not really investigated this topic thoroughly, and nor do I think that it's discussed in any systematic way in the web design literature. I'm therefore open to suggestions here and/or knowing about any useful examples you might have seen yourself.

When you play an adventure game, no matter whether it's computer-based (Half-Life has to be the all-time classic here) or something like Dungeons and Dragons, exploring the "labyrinth" is part of the fun. On the other hand, being lost in a big, unfamiliar city is no fun at all. In each case, a map will help your wanderings enormously - as of course will big signs saying "This Way To The Dragon's Lair!" (or similar).

A good menu, and clear and helpful links, should act as the "signposts" of a web site. But there's no reason why you can't provide visitors with a map of the whole terrain as well. In effect, that's what the Subject Index and A-Z Index on this site are - particularly the latter. A site map shows the whole site at once, so people know what's there before they start browsing.

This idea may strike you as rather pointless, for two reasons, both of them quite valid:

• "My site's only got half-a-dozen pages!" In that case all you need is a well-crafted menu. A site map would only seem necessary on large sites where a single menu would be too unwieldy.
• "If I'm going to all the bother of following your three-click rules and thinking about my site's structure in such detail why should people need a map?" Another good point. But sometimes people arrive at a site wanting very specific information. Your site's particular structure may just not quite match their needs. For example, this site is basically designed to be read in order from lesson 1 to lesson 12. But if someone arrives wanting a little bit of information on, say, the <AREA> tag but isn't familiar enough with the site (or indeed the <AREA> tag) to know straight away that it's on lesson 7, they might rather have a different index - a map, in effect - that tells them how to get straight there. And that's why the A-Z Index exists. What a nice guy I am.

As to how you might best provide such a map - well, I'm open to suggestions. The worst way to do it would be to use a graphics package to draw a fantastically complex diagram of all the pages and links and then simply plonk that somewhere on your site: a classic case of "information as an image". At the very least you need to make the map active, that is, allow people to use it to jump straight to a given page.

Here's an example, for instance: a map to a small fan site devoted to a random celebrity (note that not only is the celebrity purely hypothetical, so's the site: these are "real" links, but they won't go anywhere):

Doing a map like this, incidentally, might not be a bad idea for you as a designer... it could show you when your structure is illogical, and get you thinking about your site in systematic terms. It might also serve as a useful list of all the pages, so when you come to do updates, you remember them all.

Google has quite a good site map at http://www.google.co.uk/sitemap.html - this will open in the second browser window. Google also offers another possibility here, the site search facility, but I must admit that despite trying for a while I have never been able to get this to work. Reports welcome: perhaps I am missing something obvious.

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