Anyone know of a good search engine friendly menu script?

[chadurban]

I am looking for a website menu navigation script, something that is search engine friendly and will actually show the web links in the code. Was debating on something in PHP but that would require the website page extensions to be changed (which I don't want to do so not to loose my search engine rankings). It doesn't have to be to fancy (maybe uses a 2 or 3 level dropdown) as long as its not to Javascript heavy. Also would like to be able to have different sections on my site use different menus. Anyone know of any scripts they might have used in the past or ran across recently?

[surrealillusions]

if its CSS based, then you cant go wrong.

If you remember that bots cant use javascript, and use that as less as possible then the better. If your menu can be read by bots in the source code even with javascript then still good.

If you have to use javascript to generate your menu, use a html/css only menu at the bottom of the page, or a sitemap linked via plain html somewhere on the page then this will help.

:)

[Receptional Andy]

if its CSS based, then you cant go wrong

I would adapt this slightly, and say that if it is HTML list-based you can't go too far wrong.

Was debating on something in PHP but that would require the website page extensions to be changed

You don't need to change the file extension - you can just parse .html or .htm files for php [google.com]

[Fotiman]

You could try the Yahoo UI Library's Menu component:
[developer.yahoo.com...]

Your menu will be semantic HTML lists, and then JavaScript + CSS will turn it into a menu.

If you use the files served from Yahoo (vs. hosting the library files yourself), then you'll be using minified and GZIP compressed files (which the user might already have cached if they've visited any other sites using the Yahoo UI Library).

[chadurban]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I do have a PHP menu script to use, so it would seem all I need to do is add this to my .htaccess file?

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

I am running FrontPage extensions but can access the file through an FTP program as well. Should I simply download the .htaccess file, add the line above to it in notepad, and upload it again? The only other line in the .htaccess file is for a 404 error handeling page. I just don't want to screw anything up.

[Receptional Andy]

I believe that will work, but I'm also aware that lots of people have had problems using htaccess entries and frontpage [google.com] together. I would either try it out in a test environment or do a bit of research first.