4 replies to this topic

[Paul J]

A friend of mine is building her e-commerce promotional products site with Yahoo! SuiteBuilder. I've only briefly seen it, but have never worked with it. Other than graphic restrictions, does anyone know if there are any SEO restrictions, and/or is SiteBuilder able to be optimized fully?

Thanks in advance,

Paul

[mcanerin]

This isn't directly in answer to your question, but it is related.

A friend of mine was hosted on Yahoo for a while and had all sorts of problems. Everything was ok at first, but then the site would go down for no reason for days, the email got backlogged, and there were several issues with billing. In one case they sent him a bill. He paid it. And THEN they stopped his site for non-payment a week later.

After he complained, there was no apology, they just turned on the site again and implied it was just a glitch. Most people consider their livelyhood to be worth more than a "glitch".

The final straw was that he went to his site one day and found that it had been defaced by a hacker. The problem was that when Yahoo turns on your Front Page extensions, they automatically give a blank password to Frontpage. So my friend was blissfully unaware that although his Yahoo account was protected by a good, secure password, and that when his was using FTP to upload pages he had a password, they had decided to give anyone on the planet access to his site as a default for FP.

I don't know any competent system administrator who would default a system at ANY time to a blank password, in particular one that was publicly available like a webserver. You would have to be totally untrained to do that. At the very least you would give SOMETHING, like a temporary one. Or maybe even notify the user that they have to go set one.

He switched hosts, naturally. As you can see, I'm not a big fan. If you use it, have someone experienced double check all the security.

Ian

[K.S. Katz]

The Yahoo sites I've seen are what I commonly refer to as "sites in a box". They use templates and are very unforgiving with alterations (creating individual title tags, meta tags, etc). I would heavily recommend looking into a custom ecommerce solution and stay away from Yahoo. It may cost more in the beginning; however, the alternative is going with a site in the box and then not being able to market the site.

A good place to go for dynamic site optimization information is: http://www.spider-food.net

[Jill]

By yahoo site builder, are you talking about a Yahoo store? This is a whole other thing than dynamic site optimization.

If you're talking about a yahoo store, you have to use yahoo's templates. They can definitely be optimized, but not in the same way as one would normally optimize a site, because you can't just edit the html code.

Jill

[deborah2002]

I can say from experience that you can forget "optimizing" a Yahoo store. Yahoo is very particular about what you can and cannot "touch" on their store.

They want to promote "their" store cuz they make a % off the sales if your visitors enter/buy through the store, so they don't like you messing with anything.

They WILL allow a certain amount of pictures/text, but it ain't much so choose wisely!

Best of luck to you!

deb