Big websites are hard to picture. A spreadsheet of 1,700 URLs doesn’t tell you where the weight sits, which sections sprawl, or which pages are buried nine clicks deep. So I built a map you can fly through.
Every dot is a page on gcu.edu, arranged by the site’s own hierarchy:
- Color by section (degree programs, blog, colleges, career guide…) or by crawl depth, to spot content buried too deep.
- Node size tracks unique internal links, so the pages the site treats as important stand out.
- Click any page for its title, H1, depth, inlinks, word count, and how many pages sit beneath it.
- Search, filter sections from the legend, and spin or orbit the whole thing.
I can build the same map for any website. It’s a fast way to show a team what their architecture really looks like before deciding what to fix.
At GCU, the map did exactly that. It showed where the degree program section’s structure broke down, which led to the hybrid site architecture I proposed to fix it.