There are a variety of ways you can do a site map. While Google like you to have a site map in their site map proprietary format, you can get away with just a simple html file containing lists to all your pages (and msn and yahoo now use that format as well).

Or, use their free site map generator (link in the source section).

If this is too complicated, you can just create a simple text file (see the 2nd link in the source for details).

If you install the python script, you can schedule it to run automatically every few days in which case it would correct errors automatically (remove old links, etc) and update the last modification time of files, etc.

Yahoo and MSN, as well as Google support for Site map protocol (see source) so it's definitely a useful way to assist the search engines.

Think of it as a simple way to assist the search engines index your site.

Cheers

1. Upload your website to your hosting service.

2. Create a robots.txt file using the new sitemap protocol.

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

NOTE: Make sure you add the blank line below the Disallow line, sitemap.xml statement must be on the last line:

Upload the robots.txt file to the root directory of your website

3. Create a sitemap.xml file

Use the free sitemap generator:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/about-site...
Click on: Free Online Sitemap Generator Tab

Upload your sitemap.xml file to the root directory of your website.

4. Add your sitemap to Google Webmaster tools (including Sitemaps).

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

5. Add your site to Yahoo Site Explorer

Do a Yahoo search for Yahoo Site Explorer

6. Add your site to Microsoft Live Search (MSN)

They will automaticly pickup all your WebPages from your robots.txt file.