| LED Digest 2107: JavaScript and Search |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. March 1, 2006 Issue #2107 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Drop-Down Menus & Search Engines ==-- ~ Mark Bishop "...there are actually good strategies for accessible drop-down menus..." ~ Tim Mullen "...I always add navigational text links at the bottom of the page." ~ Donna Donohue "There are ways to do a drop-down menu and have it very search engine friendly." --== Outsourcing ==-- ~ Joanne Glasspoole "I don't think boycotting products made in other countries is the answer." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Fighting Spam: An Update ==-- ~ Tom Aman --== US Website Maintenance Rates? ==-- ~ Peter D'Aprix --== The LED Archives ==-- ~ Steve Pronger ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Mark Bishop Subject: Drop-downs > Do you have any suggestions for how to maximize > the SE friendliness of the javascript necessary to > have my navigation in drop-down menus? - Sandy Keller, LED 2105 > I actually don't like javascript menus, as I prefer > everything to be just one click to get from page > to page. Some are good, but others are > definitely not that. - James Miller, LED 2106 In my opinion, there are actually good strategies for accessible dropdown menus, yes, using a little javascript and CSS. It's worked well for me and my well indexed by SEs. If you look at the code of my site, you'll see that the dropdown menu is just a list that is easily read by any spider. If javascript is turned off, a list will show up where there drop down menu is. Not great, but still accessible. My site: www.healthyschoolscampaign.org Script I used for dropdown menu: http://www.udm4.com/ Other tutorials on making accessible CSS dropdown menu: http://snipurl.com/mxjr [evolt.org] http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dropdowns/ Mark Bishop ------- new post - same topic ------ From: Tim Mullen Subject: Drop-downs I have found the drop down menus look very nice and clients like them. However, knowing the SE problem, I always add navigational text links at the bottom of the page. This is vital for text only browsers also. The SE's are happy with the text links and the client has his preferred fancy drop downs. Tim Mullen ------- new post - same topic ------ From: Donna Donohue Subject: Drop-downs There are ways to do a drop down menu and have it very search engine friendly. You would use CSS and an external javascript. the navigation is an unordered list, which search engines like a lot I'm told, and the CSS displays it in the drop down. Project Seven has many of these, and tutorials on them. There is also the suckerfish menus. It is not hard if you can code, and your designer should be able to do this. The only part on the page is the UL and link, no javascript on it, yet it will drop down / fly out and looks nice on top of it. You can see the project seven menu in action here: http://goldenexpression.com/. Look at the source and you can see the text links plainly not embedded in javascript. The menu is neat and clean and search engine friendly. There is an example of the suckerfish drop downs here: http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/example/ Again, you can view the source and see the plain text unordered list links, and all the CSS and javascript can be moved off the page to external files. This is just the whole script and CSS to learn by. It can be done. Donna Donohue ------- new post - new topic ------ From: Joanne Glasspoole Subject: Outsourcing Rick Gortatowsky's post was very interesting [issue 2106]. I am a small business owner contemplating outsourcing to India, but I am torn, because I know in my heart it makes economic sense to keep our money here. As a small business owner, though, hiring an Indian professional for three or four times less money is an attractive option (maybe it's greed). I understand why the corporate giants are outsourcing (saves money), but at the same time, it puts Americans (or whatever country you live in) at a competitive disadvantage. I don't think boycotting products made in other countries is the answer. Instead, I think if we produce products that are of higher quality, spending more money as a consumer will not be an issue. The perception that Japanese made products are better than American made products is strong. If the US wants to stay competitive in the global economy, our quality control standards need to be higher. Joanne Glasspoole http://www.glasspoole.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Tom Aman Subject: Fighting Spam - Update About a month ago, I sent in a post re Fighting Spam [issues 2087 and 2089]. In that post I gave the results of my using any "unsubscribe" options appearing in SPAM email. Remember, the conventional advice from the "experts" is that doing this merely confirms your address and brings in more SPAM. The problem with that advice is that it effectively means the CAN-SPAM act would have no effect as the CAN-SPAM act requires UBE to contain a means of unsubscribing and, for the act to be effective, you have to unsubscribe. In that original post, I stated that, before starting to unsubscribe, I established that I was receiving an average of 295 SPAM emails per day. 35 days after starting to unsubscribe that average was down to 151 (51% of the original average) and two weeks after that it was down to 138 (47% of the original average). It is now a month later and this post is just to give everyone an update on my SPAM fight results. My latest 10 day average of SPAM received is 36 or 12% of the original 295. Obviously, contrary to the conventional advice from the "experts", unsubscribing does work. This number is also low enough that I no longer need to use any form of SPAM filter. I can now deal with all the incoming SPAM in a minute or two, including taking time to unsubscribe where the option is offered. I would be interested in hearing the experience of others who were receiving a lot (more than 200 per day) of SPAM and have tried or are trying the "unsubscribe" approach. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Peter D'Aprix Subject: Web rates RE Web Rates: I have to agree with the others on one point certainly, there is no norm, we have no standards. I have to think that rates in a competitive and capitalistic world are a balance between what you think your time and expertise is worth vs what the market will pay. But I have to look at the value of other people's time. In our area of California, a plumber get anywhere from $45-$75 per hour; a lawyer $250 and up; they guy who blows leaves and rakes up the yard $15-$25 an hour; the person who runs the vacuum cleaner $20-35 an hour; the guy who installs RAM in my computer $100 an hour. So it sounds as though some people here rate their talent, training and expertise at a tad more than the guy who blows up leaves and way below a plumber or other skilled laborer. Frankly I don't. I handle maintenance for my web design clients at the same rate as I charge for designing the site in the first place. Most of the site maintenance I do involves changes to the site that has an impact on the graphic design of the page and may well involve links and other such things. It would be much to easy for someone not familiar with the underpinnings of the site structure to really damage the site which could cost my clients a lot more to fix than to make the changes correctly in the first place and they seem to know that. But then my sites tend to be sensitive that way. But I have built sites where it is less so. In which case, knowing that they will want to self maintain (discussed in advance), it is possible to build the sites so that they or anyone else the designate can use Contribute by Macromedia (now owned by Adobe) to make simple text and content changes. But even with that, since they work on the site itself as it sits on the server rather than a copy, what they change goes public. If they don't know the basics of what they are doing, they can really mess up the font settings, break the CSS settings etc. Some designers can create a site in PHP so that the client or those they designate to maintain content can do so using a browser and an admin panel rather than having access to the core site. There are many options based on what kind of a site is being maintained and what type of maintenance is required. This should be worked out in advance of actually building the site. We don't have unions in this business that I know of. We don't even have guilds that help establish standard practices and pricing values such as professional photographers have had for decades, not that those are hard and fast either. But my experience in recent years is that if you don't value your own expertise and time then why should anyone else? Aim too low and you become an interchangeable commodity rather than a valued expert. The offshore outsourcing that we have been discussing for a while now has further enhanced that. So you have to offer more than just the ability to put a web site together. We have to ask ourselves "what value am I adding to my client's business that he / she can't get cheaper somewhere else?" That's tough but necessary. Just being able to build a web site is not enough today when anyone's kid can build a web site and now with Google's Page Creator: http://snipurl.com/mwbk [google.com] But just a couple of years ago, Communication Arts (I think it was Comm Arts) published a listing of expected hourly rates and web designers and web programmers were both around the $80 per hour mark. The creative and graphic design rates for the creative work was around $200 an hour while paste up was down around $40-$60 an hour. But you have to factor in your investment in your computer equipment, software, past and ongoing training, business overheads, rent, accountant fees, etc. Does that help at least a little? I hope so, but your question is one I think we are all wrestling with each in their own niche in this new and changing age where valued skills of the past, even from just 10 years ago, are being supplanted with new skills and / or cheaper costs from abroad for the routine work. Just the digitalizing of many skills have devalued what used to be high priced artistic labor such as retouching of photographs, a topic that like off shore outsourcing, is discussed in The World is Flat. Skills that had high value 10 years ago even 5 years ago do not today. On that happy note, good luck. Peter D'Aprix - Visual Communications http://peterdaprix.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Steve Pronger Subject: LED archives > I specifically Googled audettemedia.com bookkeepinghelp.com > and then reviewed the more results... Yours is backlinked due > to the http:// - Cheryl Berry, LED 2106 You're right Cheryl, I always include my full URL in posts for that very reason i.e. it will get hyperlinked in archived issues. But when I say "backlinks" I'm not actually referring to whether the URLs are hyperlinked in the posts, but whether the search engines actually report that particular page as a link to your site. You can check this yourself by doing a search for link: followed by your domain. In my case Google report 92 links, Yahoo 1,520 and MSN 3,455. It's a well known fact that Google doesn't give you full picture on these searches, only a "sampling". Why, I'm not really sure. Theories abound. But I couldn't find audettemedia.com in any of my reported backlinks and I was curious as to whether anyone with a hyperlinked URL on one of those pages could identify it as a backlink. I suspect that even though Google (alone) had managed to index these not-normal URLs it can't spider the outbound links on the pages. As a comparison, this is a page from a discussion list I used to participate in a few years ago: http://www.adlandpro.com/archives/287.htm Note it's a regular URL, with a Google Pagerank of 2. The engines have no trouble identifying this page (and dozens of others from that list) as a backlink to my site. This is why Mike Banks Valentine advised in LED 2102: > Your post to LED got you a link from the last issue, > now posted in the archive and re-crawled often due > to frequent updates and high popularity. Mike's post was a good one. Posting to discussion lists like LED (with your full URL of course) is a great way to acquire backlinks and spider visits. It's just that the LED archives, because of the way they are archived, did not appear to be providing those benefits. In case you were wondering, I didn't search through 3,455 links. I use a program called SEO Elite to analyze the links to my site. It not only reports on who is linking to you, but how i.e. anchor text, and what percentage of keywords make up that anchor text. Steve Pronger http://www.stevepronger.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. 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