PowerMapper is a web crawler

Web crawler

A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters.This process is called Web...

 that automatically creates a site map

Site map

A site map is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion...

 of a website using thumbnails of each web page. A number of map styles are available, although the cheaper Standard edition has fewer styles than the Professional edition.

Map styles

Site maps can be displayed in a number of different map styles which arrange sites into a tree structure. Some styles display thumbnails for each page, others use text-only presentation. Map styles include:

• Electrum - a simple thumbnail map style
• Electrum 2.0 - a variation of the Electrum style that works better on larger sites
• Isometric - a thumbnail map style using a pseudo-3D isometric projection
• Page Cloud - a thumbnail map style with pages clustered into 3D clouds
• Skyscrapers - an abstract representation of pages that looks like city blocks
• Thumbtree - a heirarchical thumbnail map style
• Table Map - a plain text list of pages in a table
• Table of Contents - a plain text list of pages
• Tree View - an expanding table of contents

Site maps can also be exported in XML sitemaps format for use by the Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines.

Reviews

The product received positive reviews in InfoWorld for the 1.0 release in 1997, and subsequent reviews for the 4.0 release in Microsoft Technet Magazine and WebsiteTips.com were also favorable.

A list of problems commonly encountered by users is provided by the vendor in the PowerMapper FAQ.

Licensing

PowerMapper is commercial licensed software which uses serial numbers to prevent unlicensed usage. Standard licensing is per-user, but pooled floating licences are also available at extra cost.

See also

• Site map
  Site map
  A site map is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion...
  
  , a graphical representation of the architecture of a web site
• Sitemaps, a standard for URL inclusion in search engines