Joomap is a great component that will create a site map of your website. If you visitors loose their way, they can simply click the site map and find their way to what it is they are looking for. It is a must have component especially if you are concerned with SEO, PageRanking for Google Adsense.
Joomap is an excellent component that will enhance your Joomla website, make it easier for visitors to access and understand your website and improve your SEF (Search Engine Friendly) page rating with Google Adsense.
***Suggestion*** - Now before we get into the installation process, If you have an old computer gathering dust at home, I would suggest you turn it into a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server. I use the Debian linux distribution and have a server setup at home This allows me to setup a dummy Joomla website so I can test any changes or components I want to install on my live website. This way I can check for any errors/problems and work out how to resolve them. Once I have tested the changes and confident it will not create havoc with my live website I then make the changes or install the component, confident there will be now problems. On top of this it reduces the down time of my live website.
To start you will need the Joomap component for Joomla. If you haven't already done so download it from this webite.
Once you have the component on your computer, you will need to log in as Administrator to the backend of your website.
Install Joomap Component
Go to the top menu Extensions --> Install/Uninstall
Now go to the package installer
(1) Click Browse and locate where you downloaded the Joomap component on your computer. When you have selected the zip file, its location will populate the link text box.
(2) Click the Upload File & Install button
Now that you have installed the component
Joomap Configuration
Go to the top menu and select Components --> Joomap
This will take you to the Display page of Joomap
(1) CSS Classname is "sitemap" this is a default setting. Leave it as it is.
(2) Number of Columns, leave this as "1" if you select 2-4 you may have problems with the way it is displayed on your webpage.
(3) This is the location of your site map xml. If you click this link a new browser page will popup and display a whole load of words and numbers. Don't worry, it is doing it's job. If you are using Mozilla Firefox view the page source and you will see it is definitely an xml file which will help Google access your sitemap.
***Important*** The Administration backend of my web is on a different IP address to my actual website. This was setup by my ISP. So you may have the same situation where before submitting your you sitemap xml link to Google change the domain name to your actual website domain name. Check to see if the link works first.
(4) If you want to exclude a menu that you don't want to display in the sitemap on your website such as private pages for registered users only then select the menu you want to exclude on the right side and then click the arrow button <-- to populate the Exclude Menu IDs text box listing all the menus you want excluded.
The next window is Menus. In this window you can select which menus you want to display in your sitemap.
The "Green" tick means the menu will be displayed.
The "Red" circle with and "x" means the menu will not be displayed 
The Joomap "css" tab takes you to the css file for Joomap. I have left the css default settings as they are. you can make the css unwritable so you don't change it. Select this as a protection so you don't delete any import parts of the css
Click the save button at the right hand side of the page so you can save your configuration settings and get out of the Joomap component.
Create a Menu for your Sitemap
If you don't create a menu for your sitemap you wont be able to see it do its magic.
Go to the top menus button and select the "Main Menu". This will take you to the menus you have in your "Main Menu". Click the "New" button to create a new menu.
This will take you to the menu Item page. Select "Joomap"
This will then take you to the "Menu Edit" page
(1) Title - I have called my sitemap menu "Fandangle Sitemap"
(2) Alias - "fandangle-sitemap"
(3) Make sure the published radio button is activate "Yes" if it is "No" it is obvious the sitemap menu will not appear.
Now that we have setup the menu for our Joomap sitemap lets see the results. Yes the sitemap menu is displayed (the picture was taken from my dummy website LAMP server)
And here is how the sitemap looks on the sitemap page
You now have a Joomap sitemap on your website.
I hope this tutorial was helpful. If you have any suggestions or comments of appreciation for this tutorial please let me know.
