I've been working on re-designing a website for a client and I'm trying to figure out the best approach for making my clients new website as responsive as possible, without jepordizing his good search engine rankings. The client wants to add a bunch of new content to the website as well as a few new pages. The current website uses transitional html and the new website is going to need some html5. I'm tempted to use a responsive framework like bootstrap for the new design but my concern is completely screwing up his good rankings when I launch the new website. Another thing that I'm trying to take into consideration is that the existing website is an old dreamweaver template. A lot of the markup and code kind of sucks for lack of a better term. It would be a lot easier for me to maintain completely fresh files. But again, I don't want to mess up his rankings. So would it be better to start fresh and hope for the best when I launch, Or would it be better to remove the content that he doesn't want, add the new content, and maybe add a couple of media queries? Or is there a better approach?
It's the content that got him where they are in the rankings so as long as it remains you won't have much to worry about
If the old HTML was poorly written, using more semantic HTML should help their rankings as it will give the search engines a better understanding of their content's weight and meaning. Using microformats would be a good thing as well.
If you change URLs make sure to do 301 redirects so all of the links they've earned will be "passed" to their new URLs. Also submit an XML sitemap so the search engines are aware of the new URLs.
Regardless of what you do when you make the change there will be a fluctuation in their rankings. This is normal. Be patient and wait at least two weeks before panicking if their rankings don't return.
Make sure to monitor Google Webmaster Tools after making the change to see if any errors are reported after you make your switch (404 errors will occur if you change URLs and that's ok)
Read this article: How to Turn Any Site Into a Responsive Site. It may make your life easier.
If the core markup of the content is semantic and structured properly, you could do pretty much anything you want and your ranking should not degrade. If anything it will most likely improve. Also if the content itself is mostly unchanged then you're safe.
Related
I've never used WordPress.org before. I'm wondering if I can convert this html website that I have to wordpress exactly the same?
https://reporting.pacificamerican.org/pas/
And if this website is a wordpress site, does it means that I don't have to go into the codes if I want to update my content? Because right now with html site it takes more time to update all the contents.
Thank you.
Yes, you can, but looking at the content I wouldn't say it looks like a great idea. Mostly because of how static the current content seems to be.
Pros:
It looks like you are about to add a blog-page. WordPress does make such re-occuring content easy.
It looks like you have repeated the menu on every page. (If you change the menu on one page, then you have to makes changes to all pages as well?). WordPress would help with that and let you use one menu everywhere. But there are also tons of easier methods to accomplish the same thing without WordPress. (For example <?php include 'menu.php';?> using PHP).
Cons:
The "multiple sub-pages in one page" that you are using doesn't play naturally with WordPress. Absolutely possible yes, perhaps not even difficult, but not out-of-the-box for sure.
The time it would take to edit pages would likely not change as drastic as you hope. I believe that the current content looks so static that anyone with a bit HTML/CSS knowledge would rather want to edit those static html files over having to click around in the WordPress admin interface.
The scroll-spy, editing tables and things like the yearly admissions does not come naturally either. I can think of a few dozen ways to solve such things with WordPress, but if you are going to do this work yourself, then the WordPress-conversion will take some effort and the results will not always be as pretty as you might imagine.
You'll definitely take a performance hit over using only static html. (But that is true for any CMS/framework)
My suggestion would be to first look at your current workflow. Perhaps look at an IDE that can upload with a click or on save, have history so you can back up when things break, and predefined snippets that make static content changes easy, (and of course code syntax highlighting!).
What tools are you using now?
Also remember that you are asking on a coding-site. Not many here would opt to use the WordPress editor over simply editing html-files. In fact, I dare to say many here carries a deep grudge after having to work around some specific quirks in the WP editor (aka tinyMCE).
Sure, you could replicate the layouts.
Sure, your content would be editable with just a form.
It would take a lot of effort, but certainly doable.
I work with my professor to implement web-based decision support tools. I am a seasoned programmer, and am at ease with the various web technologies we use. However, my professor isn't, and he usually has to rely upon me to do even the most basic tasks like adding publications and presentations to an existing list. However, he now wants to be able to do these basic tasks by himself since we both feel it will be more efficient that way, and to leave the hard-core tool implementation for me.
He suggested that we purchase Dreamweaver to achieve this. However, I do not have much experience with Dreamweaver since I prefer to work with bare HTML, CSS etc., and Emacs and Eclipse have filled these needs very well for me.
What do you think we should do? Do you think Dreamweaver will be a good tool for this? If not, is there something else we should look at? How far will he be able to get along without knowing much HTML? Do you think I should give him a crash course in HTML? Feel free to opine!
NOTE: The website is not based on any CMS; it is completely bred in-house. We use HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. However, my professor will most likely dealing only with HTML (no CSS etc.)
For these types, I often (while cringing) reach for WordPress.
If your customers can make a Facebook post, they can edit content in WordPress. Just stay on top of the updates for it, as exploits for WordPress are found with very high frequency. Even with this maintenance, it will still be easier than doing updates for them.
It shouldn't be too hard to convert your site over to a template that you can use within WordPress. If you can't, you can easily embed content from WordPress into your site via feeds, but there is a performance penalty for this.
If you build the site with Dreamweaver, Adobe Contribute is a good option that is pretty much WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), and it is designed to work with Dreamweaver templates.
Basically, it helps prevent novices from screwing up the site too badly by locking users out of template areas (the areas that are supposed to stay the same from page to page, such as navigation).
With regards to mobile websites on smartphones;
Assuming that:
HTML code is rarely a huge amount of data
Compressed JS files are not so heavy
Images are often loaded via CSS (at least could always)
It's the same sequence (PHP + SQL = HTML) on server-side.
It seems way faster to do this way and quite easy to maintain.
And even if:
It's not graceful at all (hide Useless elements instead of generating a sharp and beautiful HTML code)
Useless code is loaded and treated.
Best practices for mobiles websites don't recommend to do this way.
Is it a good idea to rely only on different CSS to create a mobile version of a website? (Actually on different header templates, in order not to load useless JS)
It's probably a bad idea to serve HTML with elements that you know will be useless to your users.
Small amounts of kb make a difference on mobile download speed.
It means your CSS and Javscript need to be more complicated.
You users might see the content if the CSS or JS are slow loading.
It will take more processing power (I think CSS styles will still be applied to the hidden elements).
It's likely to be easier to manage on the server
But to answer the question "Is it a good idea to rely only on different CSS to create a mobile version of a website?";
Yes if you want your mobile users to have the same content as your large screen users. Which you probably should as this is normally what the users want.
No if you want to serve them different content.
Speaking for Belgium, I know a lot of people are still on Edge instead of 3G and loading a webpage takes some time. If we would have to load pages made your way, we would indeed be loading a lot of useless code, giving us quite a bad experience.
I'd suggest you stop being lazy and write your mobile websites the way they should be written. Think of your visitors and user experience; it honestly isn't that much of an effort.
I think you basically answered your own question already. Like BoltClock said, do what you want, but I sure wouldn't recommend doing things your way.
This question already has answers here:
Closed 13 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Does it make sense to use the <table> tag on a “modern” website?
Everywhere I go I see don't use table layout, it's evil, even Google says that, so why one of the most visited websites, Google and Twitter, use it for their homepage?
I don't think it is any kind of mistake, or any other stupid problem.
The only reason I can think of is, that they want the page to look similar even if client doesn't support CSS, like with Lynx.
So why everyone say it is so bad, if the biggest websites on the internet use it.
In my opinion, there are some cases, like those mentioned above, where it is vitaly important to have the same look everywhere, than it is OK to use tables.
edit: The same question goes about html elements like <center>, or formatting text with attribute align and other "html attributes and elements used to substitute CSS functionality"
Page load time is king for these guys, and bandwidth usage is extreme.
I'd have to say they use tables for raw data speed, since they are serving up so much bandwidth every day.
Also, notice that they use inline styles in the page header to reduce the number of HTTP requests to help speed up page load time.
Table layout gets more grief than it deserves. It's easy for developers to use, it's consistent across nearly every web browser, and it allows you to easily add rows/columns with little to no effort.
The only downside is that it goes against the mantra that your document should only contain content, and your design should be contained separately (in a CSS file).
Google doesn't have to care about ranking high in search engines... ;)
Yep, agreed. Sometimes, just sometimes tables are just fine. Not everyone is writing websites that are targeted at every possible browser, that needs to support text to speech etc. In general, try to learn and grow your skills and use CSS positioning etc, but nothing bad will happen if someone uses a table to position things on a webpage.
Maybe this question should be community wiki, though?
It's evil, it's a pain, but rendering is pretty much guaranteed to be consistent across different browsers.
Table layout is working on most browsers. Google and others want to reach all user, not some or only modern users. Having different layouts or layout technologies is hard to maintain and costly in delivering content.
Table layout is not tricky. Its straight forward. You dont have to look for css hacks, browser incompatibilities or others.
Table layouts are bad. Because thy mix layout and content.
Twitter works pretty well from phones in web mode. Some web browsers are truly gruesome, so I assume Twitter does what it has to.
Given how poorly so many web sites work on phones, I'm more concerned about mobile compatibility than with the concerns of CSS evangelicals.
Three main reasons:
Tables are mainly bad for search engine reasons (there's also the issue of them messing up the DOM a bit, but that's not too bad). People don't search for Google on search engines, and people don't search for Twitter posts on generally either.
Tables render consistently on nearly every browser, including smartphones (which is a big concern for Twitter especially).
Tables consume less bandwidth. Both sites have immense data loads and need every bit of speed they can get.
Browser Support - These guys need to have their websites render perfectly on ALL web browsers (New, Old and Obscure). No matter who's using their websites and what OS/Browser their using, these websites need to work.
Each web browser supports it's own implementation of CSS and this causes a similar issue to that of the JavaScript DOM support in various browsers.
Page Load Time - Also their pages are optimized for Page load times. If it takes a user too long to load the page they'll just go somewhere else. There are still plenty of users without broadband, even a lot of mobile devices don't have very fast connections depending on where you are.
Although I've done programming, I'm not a programmer. I've recently agreed to coordinate getting a Website up for a club. The resources are--me, who has done Web content maintenance (putting content into HTML and ColdFusion templates via a gatekeeper to the site itself; doing simple HTML and XML coding); a serious Web developer who does database programming, ColdFusion, etc., and talks way over the heads of the rest of us; two designers who use Dreamweaver; the guy who created the original (and now badly broken) site in Front Page and wants to use Expression Web; and assorted other club members who are even less technically inclined.
What we need up first is some text and graphics (a gorgeous design has been created in Dreamweaver), some links (including to existing PDF newsletters for download), and maybe hooking up an existing Blogspot blog. Later (or earlier if it's not hard), we may add mouseover menus to the links, a gallery, a calendar, a few Mapquest hotlinks, and so on.
My question--First, is there any real problem with sticking with HTML and jpegs for the initial site? Second, for the "later" part of the site development, what's the simplest we can go with? Third, are there costs in doing this the simple way that will make us regret it down the road? Also, is there a good site/resource where I can learn more about this from a newbie perspective?
If you don't require any dynamic content, heck, if you don't plan on editing the content more than once a week, I'd say stick to basic HTML.
Later, you'd probably want a basic, no-fuss and easily installable CMS. The brand really depends on the platform (most likely PHP/Rails/ASP), but most of them can be found by typing " CMS" into Google. Try prefixing it with "free" or "open source" if you want.
I'm pretty sure you can do all this for absolutely free. Most PHP and Ruby CMS's are free and web hosting is free/extremely cheap if you're not demanding.
And last/best tip: Find someone who has done this before, preferably more than once. He'll probably set you up so you never have to look at anything more complicated than a WYSIWYG editor.
Plain old HTML is fine, just as long as you don't use tags like blink and marquee.
I personally love tools like CityDesk.
And I'm not just plugging Joel. (There are others out there in this class I'm sure.) The point is they make making a static website very easy:
The structure is just a filesystem structure
pages have templates to consolidate formatting
all resources are contained in one file
easy and fast Preview and Publish functions
For a dynamic collaborative site, I would just install one of many open source CMSs available on shared hosting sites.
If you're familiar with html/javascript basics I'd look into a CMS - wordpress, drupal, joomla, nuke, etc. All of these are free. Very often your web hosting company will install one of these by default which takes all of the hard part out of your hands. Next is just learning to customize the system and there's tons of docs out there for any of those systems.
All that being said there is noting wrong with good old fashioned html.
In addition to some of the great content management systems already mentioned, consider cms made simple.
It makes it very easy to turn a static site into a content managed site (which sounds like exactly what you might need to do in the future), and the admin area is very easy to use. Our clients have found it much simpler to use than the likes of Joomla.
It's also free and open source.
Good luck!
There's no reason to not go with plain old HTML and JPGs if you don't know any server side scripting languages. Also, once you want to get more advanced, most cheap hosting services have tools that can be installed with one click, and provide things like blogs, photo galleries, bulletin boards (PHPBB), and even content management tools like Joomla.
I had the same problem myself, I was just looking for something really easy to smash together a website quickly. First I went with just plain old HTML, but then I realised a simple CMS would be better.
I went for Wordpress. Wordpress is mostly known as a blogging platform, but in my opinion it is really great as a deadly simple CMS as well.
why not simply use Google pages?
Here is an example of a website I did, takes about 2 hours, easy to maintain (not that I do (-: ) and FREE.
I think that suggesting you mess with HTML for what you need is crazy!
Plain HTML is great, gives you the most control. If you want to make updating a bit easier though, you could use SSI. Most servers have this enabled. It basically let's you attach one file to many pages.
For example, you could have your menu in navigation.html and every page would include this file. That way you wouldn't have to update this one file on every page each time you need to update.
<!--#include virtual="navigation.html" -->
I agree with the other commenters that a CMS might be useful to you, however as I see it, probably a solution like Webby might do it for you. It generates plain HTML pages based on Templates. Think about it as a "webpage preprocessor" which outputs plain HTML files. It has most of the advantages of using a server-based CMS, but without a lot of load on the server, and making it easy for you to change stuff on any of the templates you might use.
It's fine
Rails (or purchase / use a CMS)
Not unless you start becoming crazy-popular
It really depends on what you go with for 2. Rails has a plethora of tutorials on the net and any product you go with will have its own community etc.
To be perfectly honest though, if the dynamic part is someone elses blog and you move the gallery out into flikr you may find that you can actually live with large parts of it being static HTML for a very long time.
If a to Implement a website With User Profiles/Logins, Extensions, Gallery's etc s a Newbi then a CMS like Joomla, Etc are good , but Else if you presently have only Static Content then Its good to go with Good Old HTML, About JPEG , I though Presently Its better to use PNG or GIF as its Less Bulky.
Also About you Query About Shifting to Server Scripts , When you have Database Driven Material or When you have Other Things that Require Advanced Prog Languages , Just use PHP Scripts inside PHP , and Rename teh File as a PHP, Thats IT, No Loss to you HTML Data.....
Do Go Ahead and Launch you Site ......
Dude, you're talking about HTML, obviously you'll be styling your content with CSS. Wait till you run into IE issues and god forbid your client wants ie6 compatibility.
Go with the HTML for now, I'm sure you guys will hack it through. Our prayers are with you.
Personally, I'd never use JPEG images on a website, mainly because of three reasons:
JPEGs often contains artifacts.
Quality is often proportional
with filesize.
Does not support
alpha transparency.
That said, I'd recommend you to use PNGs for images since it's lossless and a 24-bit palette (meaning full colors + alpha transparency). The only quirk is that IE6 and below does not support native alpha for PNGs, however this could be resolved by running a javascript which would fix this issue.
As for designing a website, there's both pros and cons for this. I suggest you read through:
37 Signal's Why We Skip Photoshop
Jeff Croft's Why We Don't Skip Photoshop
As for newbie resources, I'd recommend you flip through the pages at W3 Schools.