Design and development of automated tool to study sitemap as design issue in Websites

Beautifully designed Websites are very important for communicating organizational vision to the different categories of the users in this world IT. It has also become mandatory for different institutions / organizations to design websites and offer all its services online through Websites via internet. To achieve that they put lots of efforts to portray complete information on beautifully designed websites. Website design plays very important role in order to produce websites which are user centric and can be easily accessible by the common users. Continuous monitoring is 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, so that facilities can be availed online through which a user can get his work done without visiting the concerned organization physically. Responsibility of the designer and the concerned institutions / organizations increases manifold so that the websites behavior should remain interactive with dynamic categories of the users. 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. Number of different website design issues are there which needs to be taken care of during the design phase of the websites but, Author in this paper developed an online Automated tool using .NET Framework using C# to study webpage sitemap feature as Design issue in five most widely used categories of the websites like Government, Commercial, Educational, Social networking and Job portals. The automated tool developed by author function on the b- sis of the different standards prescribed in W3C WCAG 1.0 guideline in priority 2 checkpoints 13.3. 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.