Inline frames, die, die, die (aka please help!)

[John]

You mean "LYNX". It's like a text only browser. A well done dhtml menu
should degrade beautifully in Lynx.

Nope. Links. It's similar but has more features (as if that's
hard to do !) .

Take a look here -

http://www.murraytestsite.com/stone/menu.html

This (in my opinion) is the BEST dHTML menu I have ever seen. Look at it in
Firefox first with no styles and then with no styles and no javascript, and
you'll see what I mean. It is usable in either case.

Gotta admit that's an excellent menu. Any chance of getting
the source ? Also, could I get your opinion on this one ?

http://www.udm4.com/

John

 

[John]

It's Lynx, not Links.

Bob Lehmann

LOL ! Did I put up the wrong link or something ?


Regards,

John S. Douglas, Photographer - http://www.puresilver.org
Please remove the "_" when replying via email

 

[John]

For sure.

See this site - http://www.innovosecurity.com and take a look at menu.js and
states.js.

I do ASP programming for an HTML guy. His client insisted on this.

Tell him the menu doesn't work in Firefox but your design is
truly quite good. Simple and elegant. I have to admit that the pages
load a little slow but I guess that's the Flash. FWIW, I don't mind
the iframe and this is exactly what I started doing on my site. I put
an iframe on every index page in each subdirectory. I'm re-thinking
this given the criticism of the whole frame thing though. I guess I
can just take each page to plain HTML and add a DHTML menu to it. I
just hate slowing things down more than necessary.


Regards,

John S. Douglas, Photographer - http://www.puresilver.org
Please remove the "_" when replying via email

 

[John]

It's a nice looking site. I wouldn't have done it that way. A search
engine cannot find any of those inner pages. Since there is no content on
the home page, and since all the rest of the links are embedded in
javascript, the page rank is about zero, and likely to stay there.

This is another of my concerns obviously. On my home page I
have a link to my ToC which lists all pages on my site with their
corresponding link. Will this help ?


Regards,

John S. Douglas, Photographer - http://www.puresilver.org
Please remove the "_" when replying via email

 

[Murray]

Nice checks are good. 8)

 

[Murray]

Inline below -

--
Murray

Nope. Links. It's similar but has more features (as if that's
hard to do !) .

Links. The WWW Text Browser
for
Unix -- OS/2 -- BeOS -- MacOSX -- Win32 (Beta)


Umm - OS/2? BeOS? Heh... A real rara avis, so to speak.

Gotta admit that's an excellent menu. Any chance of getting
the source ?

Source is on the page, although you'd have to hack a bit to make it work.
It comes from the wizards at Projectseven, a Dreamweaver house, and is a
commercial extension for that authoring system, so I would steer clear of
trying that.

Also, could I get your opinion on this one ?

http://www.udm4.com/

I like the Brothercake menus....

 

[Murray]

Where would you encounter the slowdown doing it that way, John?

 

[Murray]

If the link to the ToC is spiderable, yes. In this particular case, that
link is not spiderable, since it is part of the embedded and dynamically
written javascript interface.

 

[Stefan]

Yes, that is exactly what I ended up having to do. The end result (well,
"interim" result, I'm still polishing...) is to my liking as it provides a
consistent look and navigation around the rest of my site (top menu &
picture) and gets rid of the frame completely.

What I had to do to accomplish this was to edit a number of the forum
(phpBB) files (the css and the overall header tpl file) and manually enter
the links in the top menu. Not ideal but it works.

I couldn't figure out to place the flashmovie in the phpBB page but I'll
pursue that elsewhere.

Thanks to all for contributing to the discussion.

Stefan

 

[John]

Where would you encounter the slowdown doing it that way, John?

Heavy Javascript processing. As I noted earlier I put the UDM
from Brothercake on my site and when I attempted to load a page on my
system (PII/400 w/256RAM running Win2K at the time) at work I found
that the whole menu thing was slower than molasses in Montana. That
was 4 years ago and it's the primary reasons I stuck with plain text
menus.

Note that initially I thought this was due to complexity of
the menu. I had put in my entire site directory links rather than have
different menus for each sub-directory. I think I had about 24 links
in the menu. However I did not notice a huge jump in speed when I took
the menu down to just 8 directory level links. I've always looked at
speed as paramount.

Regards,

John S. Douglas, Photographer - http://www.puresilver.org
Please remove the "_" when replying via email

 

[John]

If the link to the ToC is spiderable, yes. In this particular case, that
link is not spiderable, since it is part of the embedded and dynamically
written javascript interface.

Good to know. This is why I always keep mine up to date and
linked into my main page. That also explains how Google has 177 of my
pages listed in their engine. Still, the rank is so low that I'm going
to take your advice and move away from frames completely.


Regards,

John S. Douglas, Photographer - http://www.puresilver.org
Please remove the "_" when replying via email

 

[Murray]

I've always looked at

speed as paramount.

Yes, me too. Different menu systems require different loads on the CPU and
different bandwidth hits on the download - as seen in the weight of the
supporting js files. The good news is that you only take this hit on the
first page (assuming you have externalized all that scripty stuff!). The
bad news is that it's the first page where you really want things to be
fast.

That's usually why I just build them myself....

 

[Murray]

A low rank could be due to much more than frames (which in and of itself
will not cause such ranking problems).

Here are the general rules I use for 'optimizing pages'.

1. I make sure my page is valid HTML4.01 Strict or Transitional code.
While this has nothing to do with ranking, if my code is good, I feel better
about it! 8)

2. I make sure that I have a good meta description specific to each page
(that's 'cause when my pages come up #1 on the list, I wanna make sure that
their description is seductively irresistable).

3. I make sure that each page has a title (the HTML <title> tag) that
contains some keywords applicable to content on the page, and that might be
used by someone searching to find that content.

4. I make sure that I have (in my mind) a priority ranked sense of the
content flow on the page. This lets me put the page's most important
content first, the second most important next, etc.

5. I always use semantic markup to emphasize and reinforce this ranked
importance. This means that I always use paragraph headers, and those
headers are always enclosed in <h1>, <h2>, etc.

6. I make sure that the content makes liberal use of the keywords that I
put into the title, and that are relevant to material on that specific page.

7. I use every *legal* opportunity on the page to include keywords. This
means filenames, links, comments, alt attributes, title attributes, etc.

8. I try to secure incoming links from other sites with high PR values -
buying adwords or placement on Google/MSN is a nifty way to do this.

9. I make sure that the links to EVERY page on the site are visible in VIEW
| Source - just to avoid the search engine problems we discussed earlier....

I think I have run out of ideas! 8)