Product List Tabs e.g. 1-5, 6-10 etc

[george]

Page size could be huge.

[RuralWeb]

Good try but

[fergusw]

You wouldn't be referring to the change we requested with Nicola the other day would you? LOL!

Hi Chris, this was indeed the item that Nicola spoke to our development about and mentioned to you that it 'might' be possible, however, she correctly advised caution regarding possible page load times and SEO issues.

Just found it funny how we asked for this to be included in our design, and here you are asking about it on here.

I posted this possible solution on here mainly for discussion in the community to look at ways of pushing Actinic further and whether anyone would see a way to implement - even given the issues mentioned.

[george]

Good points, well made - apart from yours George, obviously

At some point this weekend you may notice a very small red light appearing over the breast pocket of your shirt laddie. Nothing to worry about I'm sure.

[fergusw]

Fergus - Have you noticed any negative impacts with the SE's?

To be honest Jonathon, this was just something that spilled out of some development ideas we throw around.
It was posted here for discussion, and as such we have not looked into the SE issue in any great detail.

We feel there would be a couple of instances where page load and SE issues may not be a prohibitive issue, and these have been mentioned by community members above

[fergusw]

Page size could be huge.

They could be!
We have completed a few tests on pages with 100+ products in tabs of 10 etc. The main load issue is for images - the HTML content is loaded pretty quickly (the product layout uses CSS - not tables), therefore in this test the first 10 images show reasonably quickly, as expected, while viewing the first tab, and the other 90+ images continue to load in the background.
Not ideal, but.......

We are now looking at ways to dynamically create the tabs and link using AJAX style loading to pull in sub-sections - and possible getting sub-sections dynamically created on the fly. Sledgehammer vs nut is at the back on my mind with this idea though ....... perhaps Gabriel can throw his input in the ring and further the theory a little more.

At some point this weekend you may notice a very small red light appearing over the breast pocket of your shirt laddie. Nothing to worry about I'm sure.

Did I forget to charge my pacemaker batteries again George?

[TraceyHand]

perhaps Gabriel can throw his input in the ring and further the theory a little more.

Gabe is MIA today

Maybe Bill Gates has kidnapped him!

[Design2Please]

Thanks for the reply Fergus.

The functionailty is certainly good but obviously it would not be good to have negative impact on SEO.

Having searched online there are several articles which suggest there are legitamate reasons for hiding text using css e.g. for accessability or usability but think that based on google's quality guidelines that it would probably not be agood idea and could be a big risk to take.

"Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links. "


http://www.google.com/intl/az/webmas...uidelines.html

Regards

[fergusw]

"Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links. "

Hi Jonathon,
Interesting points with Google webmaster guidelines.

e.g.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you.

and particularly

Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

also it states in the technical guidelines

If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

which would seem to cover the CSS/Javascript method of 'hiding' text and does not immediately suggest a penalty, on lack of possible crawling.


You could argue this point both ways, and I agree that for some people the risk to find out is too great. Perhaps we just need to set up the example, optimise for a few terms, get some links to it, and then see if the SE's baulk or approve.

[stephenmcateer]

What are SEs and SEOs? (Just wondering...)

[leehack]

SE = Sausage Entomologists
SEO = Sausage Entomology Offices

[Darren B]

Lee that was not nice

Stephen

SE = Serious Experts
SEO = Serious Experts Officer

Fergus i think its a great idea, i too have a long page here http://kitesrus.co.uk/acatalog/Sport_Kites.html

[NormanRouxel]

Sausage Entomology Offices

Typo there Lee? Surely Sausage Entomology Orifices.

[NormanRouxel]

Page size could be huge.

If Product Images were the concern, then you could modify the layouts to load a small placemarker image instead of the real product ones. Then add a bit of JavaScript to that loads the real images only when the hidden products are displayed.

E.g.

   <img src="placemarker.jpg"
      realname="<actinic:variable name="ProductImageFileName" />"
      border="0"
      width="<actinic:variable name="ProductImageWidth" />"
      height="<actinic:variable name="ProductImageHeight" />"
      alt="<actinic:variable name="ProductName" encoding="strip"/>" />

and on tab load, some JS looks for all IMG tags within the span of that tab, and if they have an attributeName "realname"
then it's value becomes the image SRC.

[leehack]

Typo there Lee? Surely Sausage Entomology Orifices.

LOL Norm .