Not every site needs a site map, they can certainly be a good idea. Site maps provide a dual purpose: They provide search engine spiders easy access to all of your site pages and they provide site visitors easy access to all of your site pages. The difference is that search engines and visitors access your site map differently and therefore there are different methods that need to be applied to creating site map(s) that are friendly for both engines and search spiders.

Small sites typically don't need a site map so long as all pages are linked in the main navigation. Once you get into main and sub-navigation menu's then site maps are helpful in allowing search engines and visitors to quickly find anything they are looking for within just a couple of clicks. A single site map can be used for both purposes or multiple site maps can be created. Here we'll address creating site maps for spiders and humans separately.

Site Map For Spiders

.xml file

An .xml document should be added to your site's root directory containing links to all site pages. This .xml file should then be referenced should be compiled and placed into a proper .xml document which should be uploaded into the root directory.

Robots.txt file

With your .xml site map file in place you must then make it accessible to search spiders. Reference the site map in your robots.txt file by adding a line for sitemap: URL (example: sitemap: http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/sitemap.xml)

Keep current

Be sure that your .xml file is updated and uploaded frequently, or at least as often as pages are added or removed from your site. Large sites should implement an automated site map update monthly or even weekly or daily.

Site Map For Visitors

Navigation links

A site map designed for human visitors is just like any other website page. Link to the site map page should be included in the primary navigation or the site's global footer. Visitors should be able to find this link without too much searching.

Additional page links

Site map should also be linked from various pages within the site such as Help pages and your custom 404-redirect page. This helps point visitors to the site map as a quick and easy means to find what they need.

Overview

It's helpful to provide a short overview paragraph at the top of your site map page. This can be a nice introduction should someone land on this page directly from a search engine or elsewhere.

Heading and layout

The layout of the site map should present a clear visual hierarchal structure or your website. Both headings and sub-headings should be used above properly grouped links.

Text links & descriptions

Site map should primarily use textual links and page should not be cluttered with images or other distractions. It is also a good idea to provide an additional short description (provided there is room) for each link that allows the visitor to better understand where each link will take them.

Keep current

Be sure that your site map is updated and uploaded frequently, or at least as often as pages are added or removed from your site.

As I said above, not every site needs a site map. But those that do should be sure that the site map(s) they create are actually benefiting them. And the best way to do that is to make sure your site maps provide maximum usability for visitors and search engine spiders.

Some working knowledge of J2EE or JSF is assumed for this article.

Like some of you I've been frustrated with this technology known as JSF or Java Server Faces. There are several different flavors out there that are built on the shoulders of JSF. For instance Oracle's ADF (Application Development Framework). Oracle ADF Faces Components is a set of over a 100 JSF components that let you build a richer user interface for your Java EE applications. Oracle ADF Faces also includes many of the framework features most needed by JSF developers today.

That is great, and in many ways it will make life easier to develop in a JSF environment. Some items you will find available in these "add on" packages have a real benefit. For instance, as of the date of this article, I was very surprised that a File Upload is a feature still not implemented in JSF in respect to using natural jsf tags. There are ways to accomplish this task in JSF but they are not native JSF approaches. The process is a "no brainer" in just about every other framework available today, including asp.net.

Another simple task (I thought) was having a data table present the results of a query in an editable format. Possibly to update a user record or shopping cart. After working in other technologies it was very efficient to return a result set to a data table object and let that object take care of some of the trivial behaviors and characteristics of the table itself. When I started exploring JSF I was frequently and at every turn becoming more and more frustrated in trying to duplicate some of the most basic of processes similar to managing records through data tables.

There are not a whole lot of resources out there yet on JSF although it is growing steadily, and I found that all too often the resources that I was finding on the internet either didn't apply to the more simple tasks or the information was just completely wrong. One example of that was that it was stated in one article I read that you cannot use command buttons inside of a JSF data table. The recommendation was to use JSF hyperlinks instead when trying to perform an action from a data table due to a bug in the framework that prevented command button actions to fire if the button resided inside of a data table.

At first I thought "you've got to be kidding me"! Then I remembered that I've been finding a fair amount of "bogus" information in regards to JSF development so I decided to do further research and discovered that information to be less than accurate as well.

I simply had to find a way to populate a data table through a result set and get a command button to fire an action and pass all of the data in the data table to the backing bean to update the record. Multiple command buttons would exist as well as hidden fields pertaining to id numbers and so forth. Pretty basic stuff and we've all done it before with relative ease.

It turned out that the solution was in fact a simple one. "Binding". You've heard about it and read about it. But this approach was something a little different as far as I could find.

Many of the blogs and articles that I read dealt with passing the values as parameters and following the steps to define the parameters in faces.config files etc., then retrieving the parameters in a backing bean. Processing the passed data required another set of procedures to utilize mapping to each of the field parameters passed and then processing could begin.

That seemed like a whole heck of a lot to me just to retrieve form data. Then it occurred to me that I should be able to "bind" a text field component on a page to a backing bean. Once it is bound then all I have to do is extract the data. And that's all there is to it. My query returned results and pre-populated a data table including text fields with the values of the query pre-populated in the text fields.

Each one of those text fields was bound to a "HtmlInputText" type in my backing bean. It was not a String type like other approaches define. Doing that does require you to map parameters and populate that String variable through your set methods once the form is submitted.

What I found is that if I bind my text field to a property of text field type that it solved my problem of passing values from a data table, and I didn't have to define parameter fields anywhere in any xml file. Now that I had that figured that out I needed to figure out how to get the value of that property that I've bound my form field to, well why not getValue()?

I personally hadn't seen any examples online or in books for retrieving the value from a form binding it to the type of form element it was and simply use the getValue() to pull out the value of the object. Used like this getParameterFromForm().getValue().

Let me clarify that I am NOT saying that trying this approach isn't documented anywhere, I find it hard to believe that I've had some stroke of genius that no one has had before in the world of java, especially since I'm coming from .NET and ColdFusion.

After doing that I no longer had any problems passing form data to my backing bean. I was able to dynamically populate data tables with any number of records including any number of command buttons within that data table and I didn't have to concern myself with remembering to define parameters in any other areas of the application.

So put simply you can bind your form fields to properties of the same type in your backing bean, and then extract the value of that object using getValue() if you prefer over utilizing parameter string mapping and similar approaches for processing form data. I found it to be easier and less time consuming which has costs associated to it as well.

Using Coldfusion dedicated server, web developers can build multi-functional websites, content publishing systems, e-commerce websites, and a host of other things. Coldfusion is an easy to learn, user friendly, tag based scripting language which has connectivity to enterprise level data and strong in built searching capabilities, all of which helps in creating brilliant web pages.

Developed by JJ and Jeremy Allaire and released as an Allaire product in July 1995, Coldfusion along with Allaire was acquired by Macromedia in 2001, while Macromedia in turn was sold to Adobe Systems in 2005. A Coldfusion dedicated server is an application server used to develop both computer software and dynamic websites. Products in the same category as that of Coldfusion are Microsoft ASP.NET, JavaServer Pages or PHP. ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) is the scripting language, similar in nature to JSP, ASP.NET, PHP and HTML is a brilliant and distinguishing feature of Coldfusion. Nonetheless it must be remembered that other CFML application servers apart from ColdFusion exist as does other compatible scripting languages like Actionscript and embedded scripts written in CFScript.

A Coldfusion dedicated server is generally used for data filled websites or intranets but remote services like SOAP web services and Flash remoting can also be generated using Coldfusion. Asynchronous forms like SMS and IMs can also be handled by Coldfusion thanks to the gateway interface, available in ColdFusion MX 7 Enterprise Edition.

Some of the value added services that come with Coldfusion are:

• generation of client-side code for form widgets and validation
• converting to PDF and FlashPaper from HTML
• database querying, regardless of platforms via ODBC or JDBC
• data retrieval from Active Directory, LDAP, POP, HTTP, FTP, Microsoft Exchange Server etc
• XML parsing, validation and querying
• client and server cache management
• clustering of server
• session, client, and application management
• Using Verity K2 for file indexing and searching
• Task scheduling
• GUI administration

Certain implementations of CFML allow enhanced functions like running in a .NET environment and image manipulation.