This is a weird question - but I’ve run out of ideas. I just built a website using Freeway 4.x and uploaded it to web. My client calls and says the page’s title doesn’t appear in IE’s page tab. He is right, but since I normally use a Mac I’ve never noticed this before. I’ve looked at other people’s websites that do show page title in the IE page tab, and it appears this information is being read from the page title metatag. So, I went back into Freeway and changed the index page title tag to read “Olympic Nursery - Your NW Tree Source Since 1989” and upload the change to the web. No luck, IE still shows the page as “Index”. What am I overlooking here? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Having gone down the wrong path at some point in the past, I could not see the obvious answer right in front of me. If you hadn’t pointed it out, I would have continued looking in the wrong place.
Not a problem - just remember that FW does as much for you as it can. The important stuff just happens without any hard work from us.
The first page in a site is different to all the rest and is always named index.html by FW.
All the rest will have a file name which is a shortened version of whatever title you give it. It is important to use meaningful/relevant Titles and SEO pleasing file names.
Just a followup on Freeway creating a “title” for web pages.
In the Inspector Panel, I entered a proper title into the Title box. Freeway then created a truncated version of this and stuck it in the File Name box.
The file name Freeway creates is really useless (example: “olympicnursery-e” for “Olympic Nursery - Our Services”). It would be better if Freeway didn’t create anything and forced you to enter a file name - which I will do.
The interesting thing is, my original page titles (and the automatic file names) were descriptive (index, about, services, contact) and worked great. I never would have noticed this “Freeway feature” if it my client hadn’t complained about how IE was showing the page titles.
In the future I will make a point of typing in proper Titles and then replacing Freeways automatically generated File names. But I wonder how many other people (newbies and dullards like me) fail to get the full benefit of descriptive titles and short meaningful file names.
Again, Thanks!
Craig
By the way, the website now displays properly on IE
I wonder how many other people (newbies and dullards like me) fail to get the full benefit of descriptive titles and short meaningful file names
Many - but that is what separates the men from the boys, the SEO savvy from the rest.
But you can hardly call ‘index, about, services, contact’ descriptive!
A more descriptive title would be Contact Olympic Nursery and similarly the file name could be olympic-nursery-contact-page.html
You have the option in File>Document Setup (under the Output Tab) to set a Max filename length (which is defaulted to 21 chars) to something longer to allow for more definition.
Well, this is one of the boys writing who is on the way to becoming a man. I’ve taken great care with the page titles but haven’t paid much attention to the file names of those pages. Now that I’m aware of this, thanks to this thread, I’m wondering whether internal hyperlinks will be broken if I change the file name of a page that’s linked to from another page?
Thanks,
Martin
On Mar 7, 2011, at 4:16 AM, DeltaDave wrote:
I wonder how many other people (newbies and dullards like me) fail to get the full benefit of descriptive titles and short meaningful file names
Many - but that is what separates the men from the boys, the SEO savvy from the rest.
But you can hardly call ‘index, about, services, contact’ descriptive!
A more descriptive title would be Contact Olympic Nursery and similarly the file name could be olympic-nursery-contact-page.html
You have the option in File>Document Setup (under the Output Tab) to set a Max filename length (which is defaulted to 21 chars) to something longer to allow for more definition.
I think it would be more useful if Freeway showed the file names (instead of the titles) in the left-hand column under Site Folder.
Dave said: “but that is what separates the men from the boys, the SEO savvy from the rest”
Yep, That’s why us ‘boys’ are thankful there’s a place like this forum where we can ask for help from the ‘men’.
Dave said: “A more descriptive title would be Contact Olympic Nursery and similarly the file name could be olympic-nursery-contact-page.html”
Yep, A more descriptive ‘Title’ is VERY important for SEO, as is the ‘description’ and to a lesser extent the ‘keywords’. I had always believed the title, description, and keywords meta tags were created as ‘Page’ > 'Meta Tags".
Dave said: “You have the option in File>Document Setup (under the Output Tab) to set a Max filename length (which is defaulted to 21 chars) to something longer to allow for more definition.”
Wow. This is something else I didn’t know. I’m curious, is there a situation where long file names would make sense?
Thanks again Dave! I am so glad that you and the other regulars on this forum are willing to share your time and experience - we are all richer for it.