When you look at the sitemap for this site, you see a list of all the Main Pages, the Posts and Articles, the Categories and the Feeds.
This is not only very useful for the reader, but also useful for search engines.
The beauty, is that it’s all automated. Every time there’s a new post or page or category, the sitemap gets updated automatically.
There are quite a few sitemap generators out there – so why another one?
Well, I was using Headway with WishList member, and realised that my product thank-you/download page was showing up in my search results! But if I excluded the page site-wide to remove it from the search results, it also removed it from the navigation for members. After a little playing around and looking at various options – I figured it would be much simpler to have some control within the sitemap plugin itself, as to what shows and what doesn’t..
So we have the Headway HTML Sitemap Plugin – with some options:
The options are mostly self-explanatory, except maybe the ‘Use Headway excludes’ along with the following list of pages.
Use Headway Excludes means that the sitemap honours the Headway settings for pages – for exampel the ‘Whoops 404′ page is hidden normally. This is the default setting.
However, you can override the settings, by either deselecting that option, or simply by selecting one of the pages in the list under ‘Exclude These Pages’. As soon as you manually select a page to exclude from the sitemap – Headway settings are ignored. One thing to watch with this, is when you may have a product download page you want to exclude from the sitemap, and so you select that page in the list. Because this overrides the Headway settings – the ‘Whoops 404′ page will then appear unless you also select that in the list of pages to exclude..
I find that this plugin gives me some additional flexibility and control of what shows up in my sitemap, and also automates the process of keeping it up to date.
So here’s the download: Headway Theme HTML Sitemap Plugin by HeadwayTips.com
Installation
- Install the plugin
- Create a Page – I call mine ‘Sitemap’
- In HTML mode, type the following code in the page (don’t copy and paste this – as it’s html..)
<!--html-sitemap-->
- Save and test the page!
- Edit the options, which you will find under the wordpress Settings -> HTML Sitemap menu option.
~ to your sitemap success 
Paul.
p.s. unfortunately ‘proper’ support is not available for the free plugin – otherwise I’d never get any paid work done! – but feel free to ask questions in the comments..
Hi, I'm Paul Coughlin, the owner and publisher of this blog.