Milonic Menu 5.x PLUS Search Engine Friendly PLUS Useability

Poster: pinchio
Dated: Sunday April 18 2004 - 21:27:47 BST

As my subject indicates this post is about the menu and useability and being search engine friendly. I do hope those who are familiar with these topics weigh in on this.

Point (1) - The milonic menu uses javascript for building DHTML menus.

Point (2) - Search Engines don't like javascript anything, so placing your global links on a page using only this method and you'll be wondering why GOOGLE does not spider and consequently index your pages.

Point (3) - If you rely on relative positioning, that is if you have a site that is centered on the page you cannot place your global nav links under the menu layer for those users who don't have javascript enabled.

Point (4) - According to point (3) if javascript is not enabled or something strange occurs that won't allow the script to run your site is broken and will not have links to other top level sections throughout your site.

Point (5) - There should be a way to have your cake and eat it too! I mean I should be able to load the menu (with relative positioning) in the same location as my hard coded global nav links. When the menu script fully loads it will hide my hard coded menu underneath. Now when a search engine spider visits it will ignore the DHTML menu script and index the hard coded global menus items which are being hidden (visually) by the rendered Milonic Menu. To a search engine the site is structured fine and it indexes all your global links. To an end-user who for whatever reason can't load the javascript menu code they will see the hard coded menu links.

Point (6) - Everyones happy!

But seriously can others weigh in hear. And note that this only is an issue while using "position=relative". That is if you are not using "position=relative" then this hidding/backup technique will work. I will admit I have not used the <noscript></noscript> tags as an option if possible.

Rob

meta keywords (for those who search on this): search engines, position=relative,image,dhtml,javascript,noscript,useability,indexing,global links

Milonic Menu 5.x PLUS Search Engine Friendly PLUS Useability

Poster: donH
Dated: Monday April 19 2004 - 1:19:00 BST

I have just been confronting those same issues in my first attempt to use the menus.
I think I may have solved the JS-disabled problem by using the <noscript> tag to serv a stylesheet that hides the menus and instead shows regular images. Everything looks exactly the same except for the drop-downs.
Try http://test.hinshawdesign.com/slplf/men ... _v3.1.html
with JS enabled and disabled.

I am trying to solve the problem of how to provide alt text for the main menu images when using the JS menus. Several people have referred to putting "imagealt" in the menu item code which I have done for the first link in my main nav (about the foundation), but I certainly don't see the little box pop up in IE Win, nor does my screen reader read anything (it just passed right over the menu images as if they weren't there.

I tried changing the way I coded the menu item to this:
aI("text=<img src=images/button_about_foundation.gif width=204 height=26 border=0 alt=About the Foundation>;url=/menusample1.php;");
Hoping that it would allow the alt text to be recognized, but no luck.

I would love to know if anybody has a solution, because as it stands now a site built with these menus would be almost totally inaccessible to a vision-impaired user. Not a great situation IMO.
Maybe I am implementing the code incorrectly...as I said, it is my first go at it.

Don

Poster: Ruth
Dated: Monday April 19 2004 - 1:57:58 BST

Point (2) - Search - On the Milonic home page this issue is addressed. http://www.milonic.com/ scroll down to Search Engine Placement
Milonic DHTML Menu and Search Engines. This provides very good information on how to make sure the site is still search engine friendly while using dhtml menus.

Point 3. If you are putting a menu in a table cell, then putting links into noscript tags in that cell works just fine, the menu appears when javascript is enabled, and the links in the noscript tags appear when it's disabled. As to if the script is enabled and something happens with loading the menu, I can only suggest what I do just for that reason, provide at the bottom of the page in small font a table of top level links and a link to the sitemap.

Having your cake and eating it also would be nice, too bad the screen readers are not being designed to handle all the new developments in coding and such.

Ruth

Poster: John
Dated: Monday April 19 2004 - 4:47:59 BST

Some readers respond to title=, and the same tag puts up a 'tooltip' on some of the bowsers (e.g., Safari).

Milonic Menu 5.x PLUS Search Engine Friendly PLUS Useability

Poster: donH
Dated: Monday April 19 2004 - 5:48:05 BST

John,
How does one get the title attribute attached to an image in the main menu?
Do you have to put it inside text= ?

Thanks,
Don

Re: Milonic Menu 5.x PLUS Search Engine Friendly PLUS Useabi

Poster: John
Dated: Monday April 19 2004 - 15:03:39 BST


Hi Don,

AFAIK - you don't. It attaches to the whole menu item (i.e., each individual aI statement, not just a piece of it).