Forum Moderators: phranque
I'm sorry if this is the wrong place, but I didn't find any better. The FAQs recommend to stay away from any gimmicks like JavaScript and the like, and having watched my site sleep for a year now due to a little change in the code I do know why.
But if I want to build a shop system, html 3.2 alone won't suffice, so could anyone kindly point me to a place where I can learn something about a well-designed i.e. search-engine-friendly shop? PHP?
thx in advance
By shop, do you mean eCommerce type of site?
HTML 3.2 is very good, but version 4 would be better. 4 incorporates the use of stylesheets, which is a nice way to format documents instead of using HTML tags such as font, and bold, etc. It helps to separate the content of the page (the most important part) from the design and look of the page (the part that attracts users).
People will stop and look at a cool looking site, but will come back if they find something interesting and worthwhile.
You can find information about PhP at www.php.net
I did build my shop on a JavaScript basis, but the FAQs of webmasterworld on SEO-optimization recommend to stick to structures as simple as possible; and in fact after a very small change in the JavaScript code a year ago all my 160 Pages (except the index-page) were thrown off the google index, and noone yet could tell me why.
Since I now have reserved a few weeks to give it a completely new structure, I'm lookiing for the most effective way to do that, so that my pages hopefully will be indexed again. Within these 160 pages I had all my products listed and I had a lot of visitors, who came because I fed googlebot with all the keywords of my products' names and descriptions. Each page comprised a form and the JavaScript in the background managed the input-fields.
The problem is that pure html (no matter whether 3.2 or 4.0) does not provide any tools to establish a sort of basket or so, where my visitos can put the products into before ordering. I do not even need database access, just some means of managing that basket.
My compatriots are quite paranoid, I'm afraid, and more and more of them switch off their JavaScript in the Internet-explorer whithout even knowing they did. I bought the O'Reilly introduction on PHP, but before learning another computer-language I'd like to have some feedback on whether this is worth the effort concerning my specific problem.
You don't need a database as you can use text files to store data (if you need to store it) or you just can keep session information from page to page using one of these languages.
> you just can keep session information from page to page using one of these languages.
I often saw URLs containing parts like "...Php?sessiodId=xxx..." and I assume this is the way this information is transported on internal links.
How does googlebot cope with that during the index-process? I so far used a lot of internal links with the "index, follow"-meta-tag in order to redundantly make sure search engines find all my pages. I wouldn't be really happy if my sitemap is the only bottleneck through which search engines find the parts of my site.
