Changes to the way HTML is generated
By Dan on Friday, March 28 2008, 18:55 - Technical info - Permalink
Hi, Dan here, SiteMaker's HTML developer guy. I've been working to make the HTML that we output a little more user and search engine friendly. As you may or may not know, we generate an HTML version of your site mainly for SEO reasons but also as an alternative for people who don't have Flash or are using a non-visual web browser. If you wanna know exactly what I've been up to, then read on...
Previously we'd been attempting to make a visually equivalent page with varying degrees of success...so we've decided to switch focus to a content based approach. What does that mean? Well, the idea is that the most important thing on your website is the content - the text and pictures -and I've been focusing on making the HTML site more readable when you don't have flash (maybe you're browsing on your iPhone for example). There's a fair distance to go but here are the changes that have gone out in this release:
H1 tag - The first Title text box on a page is now rendered as an H1 tag. The idea here is that you want to promote the content of each page and I'm making a best guess that the first Title text box on a page is going to be the page's title. Title text boxes on the Page Master are still rendered as h2s. The idea here is to focus on the unique content on each page.New "View HTML Version" on the Page Settings panel - If you click this now you'll get a view of the site as it appears to people without Flash (minus the graphic that shouts INSTALL FLASH!).
Continuing the work on the HTML version of the site I'm currently looking into making the text render in the right order if it's laid out in more than one column (you know, like a sidebar or something similar). Feedback as always is welcome, after all, this is something of a work in progress.
Comments
Hi Dan
Really glad you guys are still listening to us and paying attention to SEO side of things.
You have given bolded text H3 tag labels which is great. I was wondering if you might also consider giving us the ability to change the colour of text within a text box and then to have that labelled as an H3 as well.
At present we can obviously change the font size of individual letter & words within a text box, but it is frustrating that we cannot change colours without changing the whole of the contents of the box. Having to insert and align separate text boxes over each over to achieve this effect is not very satisfactory.
EG. See the fist 3 words of the text on the homepage of one of my sites www.carvel.uk.com I have had to put a separate text box in blue [Carvel Insurance Brokers] over the main box in black. This is regular text, not a title, not bolded so will have no H reference.
To get this effect using just one text box and have it labelled as an H tag would be a HUGE improvement I am sure for many MF users.
Hey and while you are at it the ability to hover over chosen text in a text box to change its colour (especially for hyperlinked words) would also bring MF into line with basic functionality that your users might expect.
Thanks again for your goods works.
Justin
Google
Firstly - let me say Im a fan of moonfruit and have been a customer from the start.
Things are improving (if a bit slowly) and I am really enjoying seeing it grow up.
But I have a gripe with meta / source code view.
When you add meta tag data (as instructed by web tools to Verify site) the data is hard to then remove. I entered a meta tag which was not correct and now i cant get rid of it so I cant verify the site.
This is an odd anomaly and makes managing meta data impossible (if we cant edit it fully then it can actually create problems).
What do you suggest - how can i reset the meta data - so that i can Verify the site etc?
Thankx
i really like what moonfruit has done with Sitemaker as with having a html and flash version
of our sites this will attract more people to moonfruit which will make it more user-friendly
@Justin Hey! thanks for the encouraging words. It looks like you've swapped out that coloured text for a Title Textbox and you've now got an H1 (as it's the first title). I've had a think about what you've described and I don't think it's very compatible with the way HTML works. If you marked inline text as a heading (H3 for example) then you'd end up with the text being broken apart as a heading can't appear inside a paragraph. I'd suggest marking text as bold to denote more importance, we render this as a Strong tag in the HTML. I'll have a look at the way people are using colours to denote headings and see what I can work in.
@JY Hi, doesn't sound like things seem to be working the way they should. Usually the best place for help is http://www.moonfruit.com/support.ht... but since you're here... You need to open up the Site Information panel. Make sure the Site Keyword and Site Description only contain your keywords and description. Under those boxes there's a Google logo with Edit details button next to it, click it and it asks you for your Google Web Master Id, this is the long string of text between the quotes after the word content ( e.g. <meta name="verify-v1" content="THIS IS THE BIT YOU WANT TO COPY & PASTE" /> ). Hope that helps.
@Andrew Thanks, glad you like the continued efforts on the HTML version of the site, at the moment it's more of a fallback for when Flash isn't installed/useable but as work continues it will become more of a first class offering.
at present i am using sitebones to create my site and I have forwarded my sitebones account to my domain http://www.annamarialive.com/, it is excellent but i desperately need a site counter which I can configure to reflect the 6 million plus hits my domain as had in the past 2 years, and also I need a small counter which simply displays how many users are on my site, please please add this to your wish list, because I would fee sad to have to cancel my subscription, I am ready to pay for a whole year if I could have these counters, I am sure they are not hard to create, then I could add them to my site like any other things which can be added when in edit mode, thanks for listening, regards, anna-maria.