Create sitemap for website?

[jonfroehlich]

Gemini recommends yes.

Add a Sitemap to the Makeability Lab Website

A sitemap is essentially a roadmap for your website. It lists all the important pages on your site, helping search engines like Google discover, crawl, and index your content more effectively.

Should the Makeability Lab Have One?

Yes. Even for a medium-sized academic site, a sitemap is highly beneficial.

Benefits

• Faster Discovery: Research labs frequently add new publications, project updates, or student profiles. A sitemap signals search engines to index these new pages quickly rather than waiting for a crawler to stumble upon them.
• Deep Content Coverage: Academic sites often have deep hierarchies (e.g., Projects → Accessibility → Mobile → Specific Project). A sitemap ensures these buried pages are found.
• Internal Organization: Creating a sitemap doubles as a content audit, helping identify duplicate pages or broken links.

What Is a Sitemap Good For?

Sitemaps generally come in three “flavors,” all useful for a research lab:

Type	Audience	Primary Benefit
XML Sitemap	Search Engines	Improves SEO by telling bots which URLs are important and when they were last updated.
HTML Sitemap	Human Visitors	A simple “Table of Contents” page that helps users find projects or resources if they get lost in the menu.
Visual Sitemap	Lab Developers	A diagram (e.g., flowchart) used during design to plan information architecture.

How to Create One

Depending on how the Makeability Lab website is built, there are three main options:

1. CMS Plugins (Easiest)

If using a platform like WordPress, plugins such as Yoast SEO or Google XML Sitemaps can automatically generate and update the sitemap whenever new content is added.

2. Automatic Generators

For custom-built sites (e.g., Jekyll, Hugo, or plain HTML), tools like XML-Sitemaps.com can crawl the site and generate a sitemap.xml file to upload to the server root.

3. Manual Creation

For very small sites, you can create a simple text file (sitemap.txt) containing one URL per line:

https://makeabilitylab.cs.washington.edu/
https://makeabilitylab.cs.washington.edu/projects/
https://makeabilitylab.cs.washington.edu/publications/

Next Steps

Once you have your sitemap.xml uploaded:

1. Submit it to Google:
   Log into Google Search Console and paste the sitemap URL.

2. Add it to robots.txt:
   Add the following line:

   Sitemap: https://makeabilitylab.cs.washington.edu/sitemap.xml
   

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If you want, I can also help you turn this into a PR description, documentation page, or checklist.