Go Live 5.0 source code

designed a site with golive, ran your html validator & found lots of errors

[clbphoto]

Im getting ready to submit my site, i am wondering if my search engine ranking will be effected by all these non-html 4.0 standard errors i've found after running web master worlds html validator tool?

I designed my pages with go lives grid system instead of using tables?

If someone could please advise,

thanks, chris

[Brett_Tabke]

Any time you have html errors on a page, there is cause for concern. No one knows how forgiving search engine indexers are of html errors.

Simple "errors" such as alt'less image tags, or missing doctype can be ignored. It is the more ergregeous errors that you need to look for. The main problem area's are "layout" tags that affect content. Things such as:

- Unbalanced table or cell tags.
- Simple syntax errors such as unclosed tags that some browser over look: <p
- "style" tag errors (fonts, bolds, css) can be over looked for the most part.
- complex embedded jss with embedded html (doc writes) can confuse a indexer. If a validator causes errors on your js, be very wary.

[tedster]

clbphoto, I haven't had the opportunity to welcome you to Webmaster World -- so welcome, and we hope you find this forum community both useful and helpful (I know I sure do).

Those non-standard GoLive "grid" tags which are markup added to standard table, certainly might get in the way of good search engine rank for you. Some engines watch the ratio of text to code, for example, and in general a search engine spider is something like a really old browser -- and the proprietary grid tags that GoLive adds to tables might confuse a spider and garble the results for your page.

A search on Google for "GoLive grid" turns up several resources and third party developers who offer scripts to turn your GoLive grids into standard HTML code. I can't vouch for any of these but they might offer a relatively painless solution -- they were designed exactly for your situation, which is getting GoLive code to validate!

[overlapping post times with Brett -- whose advice is always worth taking in!]

[clbphoto]

thank you both very much, now i have some dircetion.

I have noticed some top ranking sites in my searches have been made with front page, & designed with tables, should i re-think my site & develop it using front page or switch to using tables in go live?

thanks-

[tedster]

I'm very "purist" when it comes to WYSIWYG editors -- I started developing with DreamWeaver, but I quickly felt that I wanted more control over my code than any WYSIWYG editor was going to offer. I want to know what's going on under the hood, and I love extremely lean code, so those download times are minimal, minimal, minimal.

People do get good results with FP developed sites, but usually not when they use FP extensions. In general proprietary code causes trouble, so no matter what tool you use. So I'd say learn enough of the HTML standard that you can take your code where it needs to go for your situation.

[clbphoto]

ok then i should stick with go live & check out those grids on google, thanks alot

[mivox]

Don't use GoLive's layout grids for anything. ;)

If you read the manual, and set your preferences properly, GoLive can produce totally compliant code *and* validate it for you. Right now, the only non-compliant code my GoLive generated pages have in them are Netscape4.X workarounds that I put in myself, using the code editing window.

[clbphoto]

WOW - i really had no idea, could you explain what i should do to my current site and/or for creating a new one - please????

thanks alot

[mivox]

I suggest you start out using tables for layouts. It's the easiest way of setting things up for a beginner... as you do more maintenance on the site, or build new ones, you'll be able to pick up more advanced formatting skills little by little. That's how I did it anyway... ;)