Field Notes: 

The Sitemap Builder

This one wasn't mine. Index was our IT manager's idea, and his build, to make his own workload cleaner.

Once Lennon Tree Pages let us build whole sites in a day, we made a different kind of problem for ourselves.

Suddenly, with new sites appearing in line with our ambitious project, and new content landing constantly, we had more plates spinning than any of us could track by hand. 

Each one of those sites needed its sitemap kept current so the search engines could actually keep up with what we were publishing. We were adamant that if we were doing this, we were going to do it right. No building something and then moving on, leaving a trail of half-thoughts behind us. I've done that before. Spent time building something and then forgetting it exists when I move on to the next project. Maintaining a cleanly indexed site with the likes of Google is important, unglamorous, and exactly the kind of job that eats your week if you let it.

So rather than reach for one of the dozens of sitemap tools out there, we did the thing we always do. We built our own and kept it in the family.

Index is an automated sitemap generator that lives inside the same ecosystem as Pages, which is the whole point of it. Because it sits right alongside the CMS, it moves with us, fast and accurate, mapping what we publish as we publish it, with nothing to wire up and nothing to wait on.

We'll be the first to admit there are more comprehensive sitemap tools out there. Index does exactly what we need, for exactly the way we work, and it does it without ever leaving the garden.

- The Gardener. 2026-06-22.