PowerMapper uses advanced web crawling technology to walk round a site gathering information about links and content. The process involves three steps:

		visiting the pages needed for making a map and collecting link information
		deciding on a structure for the pages
		generating a map

To avoid mapping inappropriate areas of a site, the crawler ignores the following types of link:

• links to a different web server (e.g. the crawler doesn't follow links from www.electrum.co.uk to www.microsoft.com)
• links to documents that can't be displayed (e.g. sound files, EXE files)
• links from pages generated by PowerMapper (the "GENERATOR" META tag is used to detect this)
• links inside Site Maps or A-Z indices
• links blocked by the Robots Exclusion Standard (commonly referred to as ROBOTS.TXT)
• links blocked by the Blocks tab of the Mapping Options dialogue

The main things that stop you getting a successful map are:

• broken links between pages - missing pages are marked with a big red cross on the map
• invalid HTML on a page - problem pages are marked with a red flag
• pages taking too long to load - any page taking more than 1 minute to load is marked with a stopwatch (you can change the time-out setting using the Mapping Options dialogue)
• hitting Stop during mapping - any pages which weren't visited are marked with a blue question mark

PowerMapper saves its data in several different files. If you save a map as "Filename.site" you end up with:

• Filename.site contains all the information needed to re-create the GIF and HTML files. It contains site structure, page titles, page icons and a bunch of other stuff. If you lose this file you can recreate it by re-mapping your site.
• A directory called Filename containing HTML pages and GIFs (Registered version) or JPEGs (Evaluation version). The number of HTML pages and graphic files depends on the map style settings. If you lose this directory you can re-create it by re-saving your .SITE file.
• The first page of the map is called Filename.htm. Other pages are called Filename-1.htm, Filename-2-1.htm, etc.

To use the map on your server do the following:

• upload the map directory (e.g. Filename) to your web server making sure you copy any sub-directories within the directory
• make a link to the first page of the map (e.g. Filename\Filename.htm) from your home page or wherever you think is useful

You should keep copy of the site file locally so you can re-build your site map with the same settings.