The Janitor and the Town Crier: On Two Philosophies of Being Found

In the sprawling, unplanned city of the web, every page hopes to be discovered. The paths to that discovery, however, are forged by two fundamentally different craftsmen. One works in the quiet hours before dawn, the other in the bustling town square at noon. Understanding their contrasting approaches—the methodical Janitor and the declarative Town Crier—reveals a core tension in how we think about our content being found.

The Janitor’s philosophy is one of implicit architecture. He believes that if you build a space correctly, with clear, logical pathways and a sensible layout, the right people will naturally find their way. His tools are internal links, a sturdy information hierarchy, and clean, semantic HTML. He doesn’t announce new rooms; he simply ensures that from the main hall, you can see the doorway to the library, and from the library, a staircase to the archives. His work is about relationship and context. A crawler, to the Janitor, is a respectful visitor following a trail of breadcrumbs he has meticulously laid, discovering pages as a consequence of the site’s own inherent structure.

The Town Crier, by contrast, operates on proclamation. He is less concerned with the interior corridors and more focused on the central square. His primary tool is the sitemap, a formal register shouted from the digital rooftops to any crawler who will listen. He believes in direct, explicit announcement. A new page isn’t something to be stumbled upon via a side alley; it is an edict to be recorded in the ledger and broadcast. For the Town Crier, the sitemap is the authoritative source of truth, a way to bypass the sometimes-opaque navigation and state, clearly and loudly, "Here I am. Index this."

Most successful sites employ a careful blend of both, but leaning too heavily on one reveals the flaws in the other. A pure Janitor risks creating beautifully connected rooms in a mansion with no street number—deep, meaningful content that crawlers may never fully reach because the entry points are too few. A pure Town Crier risks building a loud, chaotic bazaar of pages announced in a sitemap but utterly disconnected from one another, lacking the internal signals that suggest topical authority and depth to both crawlers and human visitors.

The wisdom lies in recognizing that these are not opposing strategies, but complementary disciplines. The Janitor creates the lived-in, navigable space that gives a page meaning beyond its mere existence. The Town Crier ensures no valuable room is left off the city’s official register. One builds the web of context; the other files the notice of presence. In the end, a page is best found not just because it was linked to, nor simply because it was declared, but because it exists as a coherent part of a whole that has been both thoughtfully built and properly introduced.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: