24 replies to this topic

[Mike1]

Hi,
How would a drop down roll-over navigation menu with links affect seo?
It would just basically be a list of about 70 links.
Like the ones here:
www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/drop_examples.html
thanks

Edited by Jill, 30 August 2006 - 02:07 PM.

[qwerty]

As long is it doesn't require any scripting to work, the search engine is likely to see a collection of straight links. I haven't looked at the code for the ones you've linked to, but such menus are usually a collection of nested unordered lists (<ul>) and that's fine.

[Raphael]

Yeah, those are pure CSS on unordered lists. SearchBots will read 'em just fine.

[Mike1]

thanks guys . . I guess I'll just have to work on
the cross-browser problem now.

[maleman]

I guess I'll just have to work on the cross-browser problem now.

That's where the FUN starts!

[Randy]

Yeah, fun.

Don't forget to take IE7 into account if you have to do too much tweaking. I spent some time reviewing some hacks for IE5/6 last week and many of them broke in IE7.

[qwerty]

Speaking of which, have you noticed any display differences between FF and IE7 -- the sort of thing that's going to have us trying to come up with new hacks?

[Randy]

I've honestly not had time to dig into it much Qwerty, but yes I've seen a few site/pages that go completely wonky in IE7. One of my own sites in fact.

Because I know what's going on in the code for that particular site I have an inkling it probably has to do with some box model hacks I installed for IE6 that are now being applied in IE7 but don't need to be. There are already ways to separate IE6 from IE7 that I've seen. But I've not had a chance to test any of them yet.

The main thing I've noticed so far I mentioned in that other IE7 thread down in The Pub. It's having to do with the fact that you'll want to make darned sure your SSL Certificate is in perfect order and that you don't give people the option of getting to the https side of your site by any address that doesn't fit with your cert. For instance, if the cert is issued to www.domain.com, you'd better make sure users can't get there via domain.com. The new warning message is quite ominous.

[maleman]

That's just one more browser tossed on the heap.

Does this mean everybody with CSS sites should start using IE7 right away?

Is it easier to get a page to wrok cross browser using XHTML Transitional than it is using 4.01 Transitional?

[Randy]

It wouldn't hurt to at least take a look in IE7 I suspect maleman. I originally installed IE7 on a spare computer to take a look at all of my e-comm sites to make sure I wasn't going to run into any major issues down the road. Those were all just fine, but they're sort of combo coding for the most part. A table to control overall width and then CSS inside the table. Old habits die hard...

I just put IE7 on my main computer a few weeks back to start looking for any other stuff I might need to watch out for. Mainly in how/if it worked with the software I have installed on my computer. So far there have only been a couple of software packages that had issues. And those were only because they didn't recognize IE7 yet.

That said since it's still Beta I wouldn't start designing around what it shows just yet. Not where CSS and Layout is concerned anyway. Who knows what might change between now and the first real release.

[maleman]

control overall width

Don't use padding or margin to control overall width. That may cause trouble. Use "width". IE likes "width" and so do the others.

Set paddings and margins for spacing on the elements inside the main divs.

Avoid using margin for adjusting width if possible. This would be on elements like div or p. margin works much better on "fixed elements" such as images.

Say you way a stretch layout with 4% background on the left and right that works at any screen size:

body { position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 4%;
width: 92%;
}

.divMain { position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
}

.divLeft { float: left;
width: 20%;
}

.divRight { float: right;
width: 80%;
}

Assume margin and padding set to 0 on the above:

<body>
<div class="divMain">
<div class="divLeft">
content
</div>
<div class="divRight">
content
</div>
</div>
</body>


You can put your header div at the bottom of the source if you put it outside divMain by moving divMain down, say 100px for example:

.divMain { position: absolute;
top: 100px;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
}

.divHeader { position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
height: 100px;
}

You can get the height of the page to stretch automatically. You may have to add an additional div inside divMain with position:relative, height:auto; and add a filler to pull the background down.

</div> ........div added to stretch vertical background
<div style="clear: both;">
<p>&nbsp;</p>
</div>
</div> ...divMain

The above is my opinion only and not to be taken as etched in stone.

It would be really cool if you could run multple versions of IE on the same OS.

Edited by maleman, 29 August 2006 - 05:51 PM.

[MaKa]

Speaking of which, have you noticed any display differences between FF and IE7 -- the sort of thing that's going to have us trying to come up with new hacks?

I haven't seen that much difference between FF and IE7. I code my sites for XHTML 1.1. I must note that the CSS designs of most my sites are fairly simple (and all quite similar to each other).

The only problem I've come acros is a float:right in IE7. It works fine in IE 6 and FF, but it doesn't float the text goes right over it. See surfstuff.eu/balance-boards/make-a-balance-board for an example of the problem.

[qwerty]

Can you post a screen cap of what the page looks like in IE7?

[Tom Philo]

I did read an article about how to run IE 6 and IE 7 on the same box concurrently. It was a command line switch when you install 7 if I remember correctly to have it run separate and not touch IE 6 code.

[Raphael]

I had IE7 installed for a while. I liked it so much that I had to uninstall it

Seriously.

It fixes a ton of stuff that broke in IE6, which, of course makes all the IE-detecting hacks we've done over the years make pages look screwy. Also, I don't need two compliant browsers on my system. I already have Firefox. So I went back to IE6, since that's what 99.99% of my IE-using visitors are using.

If we could get the entire IE-using world to move to IE-7 simultaneously, it would be very nice.