New to sitemaps and after reading Google's instructions on how to create one, was quite intimidated by all the code. Then I found a lovely website called xml-sitemaps.com, which made the sitemap creation all too easy. I have a general question about sitemaps - it sounded as if this tool would allow me to tell the search engines about each of the pages in my site but the generator didn't ask for any of that. The file seems to just pull in the URL's of every page of my site. Is that all the file is supposed to do? Thanks in advance.
Basically, yes. Sitemap is not to tell Search Engines what your pages is about, but to tell the Search Engines your site's architecture.
Sitemap will helps in crawling your pages, it tells the search engine that these are the pages available in your sites.
Yeah you need to have all the urls of your site into Sitemap. Infact purpose of sitemap is that you are submiting all the urls of the site into Google sitemap. Xml-sitemaps.com is really very good site. you can use the same.
If your site is totally new and u want it to crawl by google than it is necessary to submit google site map.it will help you to index all the pages which are listed in site map.it is advisable that not to add those pages in your site map which are mot important for indexing. for example you have forum added in your site than no need to add profile pages in your site map.it is totally depend on your requirement. -jigs