It is ingrained into our psyche from an early age that failure is a bad thing. From birth to death we are compared, or we compare ourselves, with people that have failed or succeeded. To be successful is to appear to our peers as socially, financially and intellectually superior. To fail is the complete opposite, to be ostracized by this successful society. Our preoccupation with success and its consequent obsession creates within us a crisis of identity. ‘Am I successful?’ ‘Do I appear to be successful?’ ‘Do my friends think I’m successful?’ Is it all just a facade, we have been taken in by what we see and what we are being told.

In many ways this hierarchy also applies to successful site maps and web sites. Sitemaps organise information on a site into a logical order – you can confuse or overwhelm the user with to much information. A successful website (and its sitemap) relies on the principles of efficiency; success is that knife-edge that teeters between effectiveness and catastrophe. Too many unimportant pages or non relevant pages can harm your site. Excluding some pages from a site map can be advantageous. The trick is to tempt catastrophe and not create it.

It is important to survive and once your site is accepted by the search engines, with time, maturity will make you more successful. Being around on the web for a few years is better than being the new kid on the block – just hang in there and create your own history.

Where do you place a link to a site map on a site? The most common place is in the footer navigation.