Comparative Study of Website Sitemap Feature as Design Issue in Various Websites

Websites are very important for communicating organizational aims and goals in this current era of information technology. Different institutions / organizations put lots of efforts to portray complete information on beautifully designed websites. Lot of efforts are required by the designer / concerned organization to design websites according to the different website design standards to provide users with all the facilities of the concerned institutions / organizations online, which act as an online agent through which a user can get his work done without physically visiting the organizations. With this the responsibility of the designer and the concerned institutions / organizations increases manifold so that the websites behavior should remain interactive and quick enough for the user to avail provided facilities of the website comfortably. Sitemap provides with a logical overview of the path through which a user can navigate through a website. Without efficient and user-friendly navigation, the user is likely to get confused, lost, or frustrated and leave the site without getting their work done. Sitemap gives users with the graphical representation of Web pages on a Web Site and also present them with a complete alternative method of navigating the site. Author in this paper developed an online tool using .NET Framework using C# to study webpage sitemap feature as Design issue in various categories of the websites like Government, Commercial, Educational, Social networking and Job portals. The automated tool developed by author function on the basis of the different standards prescribed in W3C WCAG 1.0 guidelines in priority 2 checkpoints 13.3 [5]. the developed tool act like a parser and renders the complete code of the website and produces results by determining the presence of the sitemap facility within the websites for easy content retrieval. The results produced shows that out of the five different categories of websites employed for analysis the commercial websites undertaken follow the maximum standards as far as sitemap parameter is concerned.