Site Map Dilemma

[wndsrfgrl]

Will somebody please help me?

My boss wants me to create a site map (manually) and the company is using FrontPage. This is a large document website and EVERYTHING is pretty much done manually. There is no database to keep track of the changes, etc. Total nightmare.

Anyhow. She first wanted me to alphabetize the docs, and now she says that if the docs are bulleted under a certain category then she wants the user to click on the hyperlink text on the site map page and have them be taken to the category and not to the actual document. I really can't explain it because this is giving me a freakin' headache.

If somebody can make this out I would really appreciate any suggestions on how to solve this dilemma. Thanks in advance.

 

[Bentley22]

1. Two Asprin, glass of water (or coffee)

2. Ouch, lots of manual input by the sounds of it. Are the documents already separated out into categories, by directory? If not, thats where you should start (I'd suggest grabbing someone else to do it, that would be a mind-numbing job on its own.) How many documents, and categories are you dealing with? If you have a large number of categories, I'd suggest you make the top map page category only, with each heading providing a link to a lower page that lists all the documents in that category(and their subsequent links)

If you only have a few categorys (3-6), try listing a category heading, then all the documents below each heading. See what your pointy haired boss thinks of that.

Either way, looks like lots of manual input. Good luck!

 

[wndsrfgrl]

Hey, thanks Doc!
2 shots of morphine may do also.

Well, I'm dealing w/ 1800 documents and growing. There are multiple categories so I'm thinking it's an endless battle.

I've created a resolution email for my boss regarding issues that need to be addressed, because what I'm encountering here is chaos. No file naming convention, etc. Doing this stuff manually forever is absolutely ridiculous.

 

[doublehelix]

I would say that in no way, shape or form do you want to try to maintain something like that manually. Your files are sitting on a computer, let it do the work for you. There are cgi scripts that can read through a directory and its subdirectories looking for files of a certain type. Here are a couple of places to start looking:

perl scripts:

http://www.cgi-resources.com/Programs_and_Scripts/Perl/

php scripts:

http://php.resourceindex.com/Complete_Scripts/

If you don't know any scriptind, and are disinclined to figure it out -- I would calculate the person-hours manaully maintaining a site map like this would take each and every month and compare it to the cost of hiring a programmer to write the script for you. Buying a script like this would quickly end up paying for itself.

 

[wndsrfgrl]

Thanks, doublehelix.

Well, I would love to learn a little more scripting and to try to figure out how to solve this problem. Thanks for the links. I'll be sure to check them out.