Forum Moderators: open
I am currently working on a CSS-for-design, 3 col site. I use a wrapper div to wrap a header, footer, left & right navs and a content div. Having look over this forum for more information about what the layout should ideally comprise in order to be G friendly, I got a few queries.
Say I am making a website for different types of food. So, I got a div 'junk food', another div 'healthy eating', another one 'recipes' and so on. In each of these divs I use an h2 to express the title i.e. 'junk food' and underneath that I got a ul, li structure that holds the links i.e. 'burgers', 'crisps', 'pizzas' and so on. I got a single h1 per page, which for my home page is the name of the website, and for the rest of the pages is different according to the li item that was selected. For example, if someone selects 'burger' from the nav, the new page will have something like 'burgers - top junk food' enclosed in h1. My questions are:
a) the h2 that holds the title for each div *is not* a link - I just use it as title. The list immediately following the h2 is the one containing the linked items:
<div>
<h2>junk food</h2>
<ul>
<li><a>burger</a></li>
<li><a>crisps</a></li>
</ul>
</div
Is that thinking logical? Or would it be better as the following?
<div>
<h2>junk food</h2>
<ul>
<li><h3><a>burger</a></h3></li>
<li><h3><a>crisps</a></h3></li>
</ul>
</div>
Or...?
<div>
<ul>
<h2>junk food</h2>
<li><h3><a>burger</a></h3></li>
<li><h3><a>crisps</a></h3></li>
</ul>
</div>
(h2 enclosed within the list element). I mean the 'Show Outline' option of the w3 validation service might show a 'logical' layout by simply returning it found in each h1,h2..hx, but is it viewed in the same way by robots?
b) My second query has to do with duplication of content that result from reusing the navs throughout the entire website. My intention would be to provide single click access to the most important parts of the website but at the same time I am worried that search engines will see that as redundant content and penalise the site. A good example of what I mean is the homepage of webmasterworld where you have the 'forum index' right nav, with all those links to each sub-forum. It would be like carrying this the 'forum index' panel across each and every single page. On the other hand there are many serious websites out there that have a static left/right navs throughout their pages (but yet again there are even more websites that ignore basic rules of SEO, and compensate by 'paying' for their ranking through advertising etc). So, is it bad to have static left/right navs throughout all pages? I hope I didn't sound confusing - if yes, please ask me, I ll try to explain again.
Regards.
Regarding site structure, try this thread on theme pyramids [webmasterworld.com] and pay special attention to Brett's msg #4. ;-)
Your reply was helpful as well as Brett's amazing post! Having structural content that way makes perfect sense; the most tricky part I would presume is to deploy the right HTML elements for the job. I was worrying that using H3s nested within the LIs would violate the way that they should be used i.e. in a similar way people (even today) use tables just for layout. I will take your advise and go with option 2 - besides I was looking at it a bit wrong, thinking that nesting the Hs would alter the structure. In fact robots probably see H1, H2, H3 as seperate tags regardless of their nesting level.
My question (b) was also largely covered by Brett's post. So in my case it would probably mean, that the site shouldn't carry the left&right navs throughout (as it wouldn't much comply to the pyramid structure). That also means I have to re-arrange my design again ,for 2nd and 3rd levels:-(
Once again thank you for taking the time to direct and answer my queries!
Regards.
[edited by: caveman at 6:43 pm (utc) on April 17, 2006]
[edit reason] Fixed formatting glitch [/edit]
