Hey guys,
I’m building a site at the moment and there is another guy working on SEO for the site. He keeps whinging about Freeway saying that it outputs “useless CSS”, it’s code is a “mess” and that he deleted half of it and had to rewrite most of it. He is also complaining about Freeway’s lack of external stylesheets.
Is all of this true? And if so, is there anyway around it?
Colm
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I develop a site and work in tandem with an ‘SEO Expert’ and FW produces code that is absolutely fine! My site ranks very well against competitors in a saturated market place, and loads a lot faster with fewer errors than other sites created with ‘the most popular app’.
The SEO guy you use shouldn’t be touching the code at all!
Tips:
Externalise the CSS and Javascript with the ‘Externalise’ Action
Externalise the stylesheets (in doc set-up)
Look at your stylesheet in FW and reduced the number of styles
Use the new XML Site map action
If you are able to, use server-side compression - this has really helped my site speed up (which google likes)
Here are a couple of sites that are invaluable advice:
http://www.thehelpful.com/befound/index.html
I also use the Firefox ‘Page Speed’ plugin, which shows how fast your page loads and gives advice on faster loading/optimising, as well as using services like Analyze - WebSiteOptimization.com which also help show where speed / page load enancements can be made.
Nathan Garner
FW5 Pro | MacBook Pro | Snow Leopard
On 7 Sep 2010, at 10:25, Colm Tuite wrote:
Hey guys,
I’m building a site at the moment and there is another guy working on SEO for the site. He keeps whinging about Freeway saying that it outputs “useless CSS”, it’s code is a “mess” and that he deleted half of it and had to rewrite most of it. He is also complaining about Freeway’s lack of external stylesheets.
Is all of this true? And if so, is there anyway around it?
Colm
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Thanks for the links man. I am familiar with that stuff already, and the site is being built with these things in mind. The guy I’m working with is happy with the site, he said it’s fine for SEO and will do well, but Freeway’s code is “a mess” and it’s “impossible to read”?
He says there are tonnes of CSS rules / text styles, yet I’m only using a few?
He also said he checked out the external stylesheet action and he said it doesn’t work as well as he would like?
Forgive my ignorance, I don’t know much about coding.
Colm
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Did you already checked out my tutorial about how to build better SEO optimized websites using Freeway Pro?
http://freewaytalk.net/thread/view/74748
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Yeah I had a quick read through it, I am familiar with all of that stuff. However, I’m starting to think the problem is at my end, with how I’m setting up my freeway document or something.
I had loads of styles in my style tab, most of which I don’t use at all. They are the default styles, so I deleted them there and the code is a bit cleaner.
However, when I create a new blank freeway document, there are still some styles which it won’t let me delete. “strong”, “em” etc. How can I delete them and start fresh making my own styles?
Also, will selecting “more readable” code effect the performance of my site in any way?
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You don’t need to delete those styles (bold, em etc.) they won’t bulk up the stylesheet at all.
More readable does mean just that - I have all my sites with more readable html.
Nathan Garner
FW5 Pro | MacBook Pro | Snow Leopard
On 7 Sep 2010, at 11:44, Colm Tuite wrote:
Yeah I had a quick read through it, I am familiar with all of that stuff. However, I’m starting to think the problem is at my end, with how I’m setting up my freeway document or something.
I had loads of styles in my style tab, most of which I don’t use at all. They are the default styles, so I deleted them there and the code is a bit cleaner.
However, when I create a new blank freeway document, there are still some styles which it won’t let me delete. “strong”, “em” etc. How can I delete them and start fresh making my own styles?
Also, will selecting “more readable” code effect the performance of my site in any way?
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On 7 Sep 2010, at 11:44, Colm Tuite wrote:
However, when I create a new blank freeway document, there are still
some styles which it won’t let me delete. “strong”, “em” etc. How
can I delete them and start fresh making my own styles?
Don’t delete them - use them.
For example, rather than create a style to make “Verdana 14px red
bold”, use “strong” to replace the Bold bit.
What I try to do is create an overall body text style which dictates
the basic typeface, size and colour. I then edit the H tag styles to
give me headings in the style I want. I can then create separate
styles that just contain a colour, for example, if I want to highlight
a word or something.
I use the and tags to italicise and embolden text.
The hardest part, I find, is keeping on top of Freeway’s habit of
creating new temporary styles if I edit something on the page. If you
can keep on top of things, and maintain and use only the styles you
need, everything is much clearer.
On other aspects of your coder’s “complaints”: Check in the Document
Setup/Output dialog that HTML code is set to more readable.
Bear in mind that even if you select External Stylesheets, Freeway
still embeds some CSS in order to keep the web site compatible with
older browsers and certain Actions need the code in the page itself.
Personally, I’d like to be able to move everything to an external
stylesheet, but I’ll have to wait for that to arrive in future updates.
Cheers
Heather
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Ok thanks Heather for the help guys.
That should clear things up a bit, I’d say most of the problem was me not keeping up with freeway creating temporary styles. That should keep the SEO guy quiet for a while!
Cheers,
Colm
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