At best it’s going to mean a lot of tedious work for you and FW is not
going to make the process any easier, there’s a lot of back-pedaling
involved. I can appreciate the desire to keep things separated
(although for different reasons than your client) but you’re probably
correct in passing on it. Perhaps when the next project comes along
you can try to maximize the separation aspect from the start and see
how that goes.
Todd
On Apr 20, 2009, at 5:19 AM, Nathan Garner wrote:
Sorry to go back to this… so, if I’ve been asked to externalise my
CSS, and all my menus are already using the CSS Menu action, how can
that be done? Does it mean removing that action and coding it
externally?
Sometime around 20/4/09 (at 11:19 +0100) Nathan Garner said:
Sorry to go back to this… so, if I’ve been asked to externalise my CSS
The point we were making is that this is a silly thing to require you
to do, at least for SEO reasons; it won’t make any difference to the
SEO performance. It is like saying “boy racers usually have red cars,
so to make my car fast I should paint it red.”
Spiders index HTML content and don’t get fussed about whether CSS
instructions are inside or outside the file. They do read related
external CSS files just the same as embedded CSS code to
cross-reference things to see things like what text might be rendered
the same colour as the background, so it really won’t make any
difference to the spidering speed.
Thanks Keith and everyone else here who have helped. The way you have
all explained it, it now makes sense to me and I can go back with
relevant arguments. I just couldn’t do that before because I just
didn’t know. So thank you all.
Sometime around 20/4/09 (at 11:19 +0100) Nathan Garner said:
Sorry to go back to this… so, if I’ve been asked to externalise
my CSS
The point we were making is that this is a silly thing to require
you to do, at least for SEO reasons; it won’t make any difference to
the SEO performance. It is like saying “boy racers usually have red
cars, so to make my car fast I should paint it red.”
Spiders index HTML content and don’t get fussed about whether CSS
instructions are inside or outside the file. They do read related
external CSS files just the same as embedded CSS code to cross-
reference things to see things like what text might be rendered the
same colour as the background, so it really won’t make any
difference to the spidering speed.
Not expecting any responses, but this is what my clients SEO company
came back with…
"Sure thing, allow me to clarify. It’s true that the content will get
spidered whether the CSS and JS is external or inline. The point is
that search engines are having to spider code which is of no use to
them, its bloated, and its diluting relevancy to the target keywords.
There is also a question of quality signals. Search engines look at
tech spec and this is a part of the algorithm. Sites built with good
quality code and more likely to rank higher. Another reason is that
search engines give more weight to content at the top of the page than
to text that appears further down on a page. By removing CSS or
javascript content and putting it into an external file, you are
effectively moving your content to more prominent placement. It also
makes massive sense from a site maintenance perspective. By calling in
separate files, making changes can be as simple as editing one file,
instead of lots of pages separately! Then there are things like code
weight and accessibility.
The site should have been built like this in the first place, so for
this reason."
Thanks Keith and everyone else here who have helped. The way you
have all explained it, it now makes sense to me and I can go back
with relevant arguments. I just couldn’t do that before because I
just didn’t know. So thank you all.
Sometime around 20/4/09 (at 11:19 +0100) Nathan Garner said:
Sorry to go back to this… so, if I’ve been asked to externalise
my CSS
The point we were making is that this is a silly thing to require
you to do, at least for SEO reasons; it won’t make any difference
to the SEO performance. It is like saying “boy racers usually have
red cars, so to make my car fast I should paint it red.”
Spiders index HTML content and don’t get fussed about whether CSS
instructions are inside or outside the file. They do read related
external CSS files just the same as embedded CSS code to cross-
reference things to see things like what text might be rendered the
same colour as the background, so it really won’t make any
difference to the spidering speed.
They make some valid points here, but the part about “following the
tech spec” is completely out of left field. A Freeway page will
validate at W3C. That is the Acid test of “following the tech spec”.
Game over, next, please…
Naturally, in Freeway, you don’t need to worry about the
maintainability of inline JS or CSS, since you didn’t write a single
character of it (just like the HTML). So the maintainability argument
is going to carry zero weight.
Where I think they do make a good point is with getting your “real”
content closer to the top of the HTML code page. And unfortunately, at
the moment that means either using an Action (dicey, at best) to
scrape all of the JS out of each page and save it as an external file,
or using a different toolkit. There’s always leaving out the rollovers
and other things that require all that JS in the first place, but
that’s a different kettle of fish altogether.
Walter
On Apr 21, 2009, at 10:27 AM, Nathan Garner wrote:
Not expecting any responses, but this is what my clients SEO company
came back with…
There are some valid points being made. The problem, which this
person is unaware of, is that FW doesn’t make this sort of thing easy
to do, especially with regard to js. He probably assumes that you’re
using an editor of some sort in which case such things would be much
easier to do.