Hi Ralfy
You are correct, I have had a programmer, who works in DW look at the code from FW and he said he would start again using code he knows.
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Sometime around 27/7/10 (at 04:36 -0400) Mike Thornley said:
I have had a programmer, who works in DW look at the code from FW
and he said he would start again using code he knows.
Of course, this is often said no matter WHERE the code comes from.
Hand-writing code is a surprisingly personal thing, and developers do
‘develop’ their own styles. They are also highly prone to dissing
tools - any tools - that aren’t what they prefer; just ask a true
hand-coder what they think of typical Dreamweaver-produced sites, for
example. 
There are things that Freeway does that coders tend not to do. It
isn’t that those things are wrong, it is simply that it is more
efficient for Freeway to work in one way but for hand-coders to work
in another. I hope that some future version of Freeway accommodates
those code-building approaches behind the scenes as well, but it is
certainly the case that it doesn’t matter at all in an all-Freeway
workflow.
Dreamweaver users (and BBEdit users, etc.) CAN edit Freeway’s output,
of course. And they don’t HAVE to make any structural changes either.
Those will be done because of personal preference, workflow
familiarity and tool-specific efficiencies, NOT because of technical
rights and wrongs.
If you want to help smooth the transition then make sure the
document’s output settings are ‘More Readable’ or all white-space
indenting and unnecessary line wraps will be collapsed and the code
made ultra-tight but hard for humans to read.
It is also a good idea to choose External Stylesheets, although
remember that this is for CSS type settings only - not CSS object
styles, which are page-specific in Freeway’s world. There are a few
actions around that help take this further but I have no personal
experience with those.
The big thing to remember, however, is that this is a one-way street.
Revving a Freeway document to match changes made by someone to the
HTML code DOES mean manual recreation. Unlike going to Dreamweaver,
where this is a preference (and sometimes a political lever), here it
really is required.
k
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my developer trades as RevvEngine.
Good points about using Freeway in a disciplined manner BTW. That’s
important with any professional production, but with web design the
innards are SO easy to see and there are SO many ways to get lazy
that it is important to stay on top of things. Freeway makes life
unusually easy for designers - which can encourage them (us!) to get
particularly lazy.
k
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Hi Guys,
Hope you don’t mind me butting in on this thread but needed some guidance.
I’m a designer who started with FWP because I couldn’t even spell hmtl.
I have no idea what or how layers, CSS, styles, standard tags etc work but managed to build my first site by trial and error for a friend (for free).
My friend/client showed it to somebody and they made the following comments:-
I’m no perfectly semantic coder but the CSS is a bit of a mess.
It’s embedded in each HTML document rather than a separate file, and
it’s not pretty. It’s pretty poorly coded in fact. I’ve got no idea
how they have created this site; perhaps with a template, or maybe
Dreamweaver or similar but it certainly hasn’t been carefully coded by
hand! This is all taken into consideration by the google page rank.
No internal links, no use of standard tags like H1, H2 etc for
headings etc… the SEO of this site is pretty poor in my opinion.
Should I be concerned with their opinion? Does google ranking really get effected by the way the coding is structured or written?
Please bear in mind that the client/friend has not supplied me with any relevant info so I can work on the SEO, this is first draft of site and a work in progress.
Regards
Steve
my developer trades as RevvEngine.
Good points about using Freeway in a disciplined manner BTW. That’s important with any professional production, but with web design the innards are SO easy to see and there are SO many ways to get lazy that it is important to stay on top of things. Freeway makes life unusually easy for designers - which can encourage them (us!) to get particularly lazy.
k
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Steve,
The creation of clean, readable HTML code and a separate CSS file is one of the reasons I am moving away from FW to another app (which I won’t mention here as previous discussions of its merits and advantages over FW haven’t gone down too well).
Like you I too am primarily a print designer and started using FW many years ago due to its ease of use and similarity to Quark. If you are just starting to make the move into web design I would advise you to check out all the options available before deciding on FW. Knowledge of HTML5, CSS and jQuery are the future and it can be quite enjoyable and rewarding learning exactly how they all work.
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Hi Steve,
Well, first off, I would remind your friend that you made the site for free
The points that their friend made are semi-valid (in my opinion), though all perfectly possible in Freeway.
There’s no evidence that Google will rate a page based on the CSS styles. Perhaps what they meant was that the code in the header of a page should be as lean as possible so Google doesn’t have read through things it isn’t interested in, but there are plenty of sites out there with FAR more CSS in them (pretty or not) that are indexed and ranked highly enough to be found so I (personally) don’t think its an issue. If you are inclined to tidy it up you could easily clean up and organise the styles used and also turn on External Stylesheets in the Document Setup dialog (but is there any financial incentive for you to spend your time doing this).
I’m not sure what they mean by no internal links, if they want other people to link to the site (to build up the page rank) then they can post the site on various relevant places (such as those advertising houses for sale abroad).
You can use h1, h2, etc elements on your pages by selecting the heading text and choosing the appropriate style in the Styles and Colors palette.
SEO is really all down to you, the end user, adding relevant content to your pages for Google to index. Don’t try and cheat the system–that’s frowned upon by Google–just provide all the information that a human needs for the page to make sense and Google will follow, it doesn’t get simpler than that.
Here’s some recommended reading on the subject: Be Found - design findable web sites that get ranked with the best
Joe
On 27 Jul 2010, at 12:39, Steven Hughes wrote:
Hi Guys,
Hope you don’t mind me butting in on this thread but needed some guidance.
I’m a designer who started with FWP because I couldn’t even spell hmtl.
I have no idea what or how layers, CSS, styles, standard tags etc work but managed to build my first site by trial and error for a friend (for free).
My friend/client showed it to somebody and they made the following comments:-
I’m no perfectly semantic coder but the CSS is a bit of a mess.
It’s embedded in each HTML document rather than a separate file, and
it’s not pretty. It’s pretty poorly coded in fact. I’ve got no idea
how they have created this site; perhaps with a template, or maybe
Dreamweaver or similar but it certainly hasn’t been carefully coded by
hand! This is all taken into consideration by the google page rank.No internal links, no use of standard tags like H1, H2 etc for
headings etc… the SEO of this site is pretty poor in my opinion.Should I be concerned with their opinion? Does google ranking really get effected by the way the coding is structured or written?
Please bear in mind that the client/friend has not supplied me with any relevant info so I can work on the SEO, this is first draft of site and a work in progress.
RegardsSteve
my developer trades as RevvEngine.
Good points about using Freeway in a disciplined manner BTW. That’s important with any professional production, but with web design the innards are SO easy to see and there are SO many ways to get lazy that it is important to stay on top of things. Freeway makes life unusually easy for designers - which can encourage them (us!) to get particularly lazy.
k
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No. What Google does care about is semantic structure. At the very
least, there should be an H1 (primary header) on the page (and there
can only be one of these, not unlike the Highlander). This should be
followed (in source order, doesn’t have to be in visual layout) by a
paragraph or more describing the content of the page. The second most
important thing on the page should have an H2 header as its headline,
and another paragraph following that with the description of that
second-most-important thing. And so on. If you took a scholarly
dissertation, switched it to outline view in Word or similar, and saw
the primary topic, secondary topics and their sub-topics only, then
you would see the world much as Google does.
By the way, this is a religious debate at this point, and it’s no use
trying to inject sense or logic into it. At any inflection point in
history, there have been furious debates raged between the soon-to-be-
irrelevant and the next-big-thing. As much as I can swim these chum-
filled waters, and find it nearly trivial to learn and use hand-
coding, I long for the day when it’s the realm of gray-beard former
experts, rather than the done thing.
Walter
On Jul 27, 2010, at 7:39 AM, Steven Hughes wrote:
Should I be concerned with their opinion? Does google ranking really
get effected by the way the coding is structured or written?
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Hi Ralfy
I’m a print designer using FW, so would like to know what mac based software you are thinking of moving to.
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Mike,
Not thinking of moving, already started. See my post at the end of this thread:
http://www.freewaytalk.net/thread/view/68203#m_70215
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Sometime around 27/7/10 (at 12:39 +0100) Steven Hughes said:
[…snip…] the SEO of this site is pretty poor in my opinion.
The use of internal vs. external CSS doesn’t affect SEO. Both methods
are perfectly ‘legal’ in technical terms, and Google is hella good at
spotting text content buried underneath structural logic and other
code.
Because of the typical management and workflow methods that fit best
with direct code editing processes (Dreamweaver, BBEdit, Coda, etc.)
it is definitely more efficient to externalise all CSS. But if you’re
working in Freeway those issues are taken care of; the management and
workflow control is inherent in how you work there.
The way the code is generated by Freeway depends to a surprisingly
large degree on how you create your layout. Knowing a bit about how
HTML works and applying that to how you put your layouts together can
make a big difference to the efficiency of the underlying code
structures. This can help a little with SEO, although it is FAR
from a black & white issue. Don’t stress about the SEO aspects here,
but do try to improve your layout production understanding.
Internal links - that’s a curious thing to bring up, but it is simple
to deal with… just make links from one page to another using the
normal Freeway linking feature and you get internal links.
Standard tags - now this IS a VERY good point. Again, it is something
that’s not at all hard to deal with, it is just a matter of learning
and applying a little discipline. Create your own H1, H2, H3 etc
styles, create a ‘body’ style and let that work as a page-wide
default so you don’t have to format everything directly. Use the CSS
Menus action for your site navigation… the techie structure of the
one in your site looks a little odd to me.
In your case, use the H1 for the “BEAUTIFULLY APPOINTED” text, H2 for
the red “A REAL ESTATE PROPERTY” below it, and use your custom ‘body’
style to automatically format your main text in that grey style, font
and size. Although the underlying thinking is somewhat simplistic the
fact remains that you shouldn’t use those ‘H’ styles elsewhere on the
page.
Should I be concerned with their opinion? Does google ranking really
get effected by the way the coding is structured or written?
There are things that do matter and things that just don’t…
A clean and simple layout structure is a good thing in general, and
it can help search engines ‘read’ content in the right order, but
other than that it isn’t a particularly important factor.
Using the right styles for semantic structure of your text content
(head styles flag important ‘header’ text, and so on) IS very
helpful. Do this.
More important than ANY of all that, make sure your pages have
machine-readable text that people will want to find. THAT is really
what lies behind ANY fiddly details of how search engines work. All
they want to do is deliver relevant results when someone does a
search.
k
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Sometime around 27/7/10 (at 08:13 -0400) Walter Lee Davis said:
I long for the day when it’s the realm of gray-beard former experts,
rather than the done thing.
Amen to that!
k
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Thanks Ralfy, please feel free to e mail me direct on email@hidden as I would like to know the name of the software you may be switching to.
S.
On 27 Jul 2010, at 12:56, ralfy wrote:
Steve,
The creation of clean, readable HTML code and a separate CSS file is one of the reasons I am moving away from FW to another app (which I won’t mention here as previous discussions of its merits and advantages over FW haven’t gone down too well).
Like you I too am primarily a print designer and started using FW many years ago due to its ease of use and similarity to Quark. If you are just starting to make the move into web design I would advise you to check out all the options available before deciding on FW. Knowledge of HTML5, CSS and jQuery are the future and it can be quite enjoyable and rewarding learning exactly how they all work.
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Thanks joe.
On 27 Jul 2010, at 13:12, Joe Billings wrote:
Hi Steve,
Well, first off, I would remind your friend that you made the site for free
The points that their friend made are semi-valid (in my opinion), though all perfectly possible in Freeway.
There’s no evidence that Google will rate a page based on the CSS styles. Perhaps what they meant was that the code in the header of a page should be as lean as possible so Google doesn’t have read through things it isn’t interested in, but there are plenty of sites out there with FAR more CSS in them (pretty or not) that are indexed and ranked highly enough to be found so I (personally) don’t think its an issue. If you are inclined to tidy it up you could easily clean up and organise the styles used and also turn on External Stylesheets in the Document Setup dialog (but is there any financial incentive for you to spend your time doing this).
I’m not sure what they mean by no internal links, if they want other people to link to the site (to build up the page rank) then they can post the site on various relevant places (such as those advertising houses for sale abroad).
You can use h1, h2, etc elements on your pages by selecting the heading text and choosing the appropriate style in the Styles and Colors palette.
SEO is really all down to you, the end user, adding relevant content to your pages for Google to index. Don’t try and cheat the system–that’s frowned upon by Google–just provide all the information that a human needs for the page to make sense and Google will follow, it doesn’t get simpler than that.
Here’s some recommended reading on the subject: Be Found - design findable web sites that get ranked with the best
Joe
On 27 Jul 2010, at 12:39, Steven Hughes wrote:
Hi Guys,
Hope you don’t mind me butting in on this thread but needed some guidance.
I’m a designer who started with FWP because I couldn’t even spell hmtl.
I have no idea what or how layers, CSS, styles, standard tags etc work but managed to build my first site by trial and error for a friend (for free).
My friend/client showed it to somebody and they made the following comments:-
I’m no perfectly semantic coder but the CSS is a bit of a mess.
It’s embedded in each HTML document rather than a separate file, and
it’s not pretty. It’s pretty poorly coded in fact. I’ve got no idea
how they have created this site; perhaps with a template, or maybe
Dreamweaver or similar but it certainly hasn’t been carefully coded by
hand! This is all taken into consideration by the google page rank.No internal links, no use of standard tags like H1, H2 etc for
headings etc… the SEO of this site is pretty poor in my opinion.Should I be concerned with their opinion? Does google ranking really get effected by the way the coding is structured or written?
Please bear in mind that the client/friend has not supplied me with any relevant info so I can work on the SEO, this is first draft of site and a work in progress.
RegardsSteve
my developer trades as RevvEngine.
Good points about using Freeway in a disciplined manner BTW. That’s important with any professional production, but with web design the innards are SO easy to see and there are SO many ways to get lazy that it is important to stay on top of things. Freeway makes life unusually easy for designers - which can encourage them (us!) to get particularly lazy.
k
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Thanks Walter.
On 27 Jul 2010, at 13:13, Walter Lee Davis wrote:
No. What Google does care about is semantic structure. At the very least, there should be an H1 (primary header) on the page (and there can only be one of these, not unlike the Highlander). This should be followed (in source order, doesn’t have to be in visual layout) by a paragraph or more describing the content of the page. The second most important thing on the page should have an H2 header as its headline, and another paragraph following that with the description of that second-most-important thing. And so on. If you took a scholarly dissertation, switched it to outline view in Word or similar, and saw the primary topic, secondary topics and their sub-topics only, then you would see the world much as Google does.
By the way, this is a religious debate at this point, and it’s no use trying to inject sense or logic into it. At any inflection point in history, there have been furious debates raged between the soon-to-be-irrelevant and the next-big-thing. As much as I can swim these chum-filled waters, and find it nearly trivial to learn and use hand-coding, I long for the day when it’s the realm of gray-beard former experts, rather than the done thing.
Walter
On Jul 27, 2010, at 7:39 AM, Steven Hughes wrote:
Should I be concerned with their opinion? Does google ranking really get effected by the way the coding is structured or written?
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Steve,
Your email didn’t appear correctly, but see my post earlier for a link to the thread with the name of the software and positive and negative views.
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Thanks Keith.
On 27 Jul 2010, at 13:38, Keith Martin wrote:
Sometime around 27/7/10 (at 12:39 +0100) Steven Hughes said:
[…snip…] the SEO of this site is pretty poor in my opinion.
The use of internal vs. external CSS doesn’t affect SEO. Both methods are perfectly ‘legal’ in technical terms, and Google is hella good at spotting text content buried underneath structural logic and other code.
Because of the typical management and workflow methods that fit best with direct code editing processes (Dreamweaver, BBEdit, Coda, etc.) it is definitely more efficient to externalise all CSS. But if you’re working in Freeway those issues are taken care of; the management and workflow control is inherent in how you work there.
The way the code is generated by Freeway depends to a surprisingly large degree on how you create your layout. Knowing a bit about how HTML works and applying that to how you put your layouts together can make a big difference to the efficiency of the underlying code structures. This can help a little with SEO, although it is FAR from a black & white issue. Don’t stress about the SEO aspects here, but do try to improve your layout production understanding.
Internal links - that’s a curious thing to bring up, but it is simple to deal with… just make links from one page to another using the normal Freeway linking feature and you get internal links.
Standard tags - now this IS a VERY good point. Again, it is something that’s not at all hard to deal with, it is just a matter of learning and applying a little discipline. Create your own H1, H2, H3 etc styles, create a ‘body’ style and let that work as a page-wide default so you don’t have to format everything directly. Use the CSS Menus action for your site navigation… the techie structure of the one in your site looks a little odd to me.
In your case, use the H1 for the “BEAUTIFULLY APPOINTED” text, H2 for the red “A REAL ESTATE PROPERTY” below it, and use your custom ‘body’ style to automatically format your main text in that grey style, font and size. Although the underlying thinking is somewhat simplistic the fact remains that you shouldn’t use those ‘H’ styles elsewhere on the page.
Should I be concerned with their opinion? Does google ranking really get effected by the way the coding is structured or written?
There are things that do matter and things that just don’t…
A clean and simple layout structure is a good thing in general, and it can help search engines ‘read’ content in the right order, but other than that it isn’t a particularly important factor.
Using the right styles for semantic structure of your text content (head styles flag important ‘header’ text, and so on) IS very helpful. Do this.More important than ANY of all that, make sure your pages have machine-readable text that people will want to find. THAT is really what lies behind ANY fiddly details of how search engines work. All they want to do is deliver relevant results when someone does a search.
k
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Have done, thanks once again.
On 27 Jul 2010, at 14:05, ralfy wrote:
Steve,
Your email didn’t appear correctly, but see my post earlier for a link to the thread with the name of the software and positive and negative views.
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E-mail addresses are “cloaked” here on the Web version of Freewaytalk.
That’s because even though you need to subscribe to the list in order
to post or reply, anyone can read (or bot-crawl) the Web archives of
the list.
E-mail subscribers (a fair percentage of the overall list) can see
anything you type in a message without restriction.
Once you’re signed in to Freewaytalk (on the Web) you can click on the
name of a post’s author and see their contact information there. Note
that the author will have to have filled in that part of their profile
(click the My Account button in the navigation) first.
All of this is designed to be Opt-In, rather than the Facebook-esque
Try-To-Opt-Out, so if you haven’t ever filled this in, nobody can see
your contact info on the Web.
Walter
On Jul 27, 2010, at 9:05 AM, ralfy wrote:
Steve,
Your email didn’t appear correctly, but see my post earlier for a
link to the thread with the name of the software and positive and
negative views.
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