large site accessibility and navigation

[tony]

Hi all,
I have a particular problem. I have a large site (800 pages), it is A Course In Miracles.

{ A Course In Miracles is presently under litergation as to the validity of the copyright.The course in Miracles was scribed from Jesus,the case being that if it is from Jesus than a copyright is not possible and thus the work becomes public domain.. The judge is very close to making a verdict and I want A Course In Miracles to be available online}.

I have a mock-up site built on a free server and am just waiting for the verdit before a full on SEO. Can you check out my site and give me some ideas on better Navigation and "searchability" and design?

http://fridakurs.00freehost.com

Thanks and May God Bless.
Tony

[jScott_Harris]

The big thing I noticed is that no two pages look alike. Not a good thing. You really need to try and implement some sort of consistency. Also, you need something on the front page letting your visitors know exactly what they'll find in this site and what it's all about. All I see is an ad, a book, a title and some links. None of that compels me to look around. I have no idea what this site is about, therefore I'm likely to leave. You might want to kill the mouseover on the book and put that alt tag descripton you have in actual text on the page. I had to keep mousing over because the message only appears for a few seconds at a time.

You have all the targets on you links set to blank:

target="_blank"

this is very annoying. You want your site to flow from one page to another with navigation to go forward and to get back from where you came. This goes back to site consistency. You might want to implement some sort of navbar throughout your site. Also, kill the frames, they're not helping cause the freehost ads everywhere. Breakdown, buy a domain and pay for hosting.

[PBITech]

Tony,

It looks like you've got yourself into a bit of a pickle, and I'm not talking about the copyright thing. You have a vast amount of information, and have chosen the frames method for navigation, and it seems as though you are almost stuck with this method now.

When designing a site, and especially being very large *One* of the most important things to plan is how it is going to be accessed easily by both the surfers and search engines, prior to jumping right in. Most of us have learned this the hard way. I believe your finding this out now.

With a large amount of text information like this, I would most likely have set it up to display dynamically, with search engines in mind. As well, with the use of style sheets, SSI, and a main-category javascript or SSI menu. That way you can change the look and main navigation of 1000 pages or more with editing only a few files. Bread crumb trails are very helpful as well, for example,

Home > Teachers Manuel > Reincarnation

in smaller print at the top of the page. That way, visitors always know where they are, and can easily jump around.

When doing things this way, it is important to have a logo-link or link to your home or site map page in straight HTML form, so that spiders, or visitors without javascript enabled, can easily access your home page and the rest of your information, if they happen to land on one of your interior pages, which will happen with the amount of text you have.

As well you would need a decent HTML site map. The site map could located on your front page, or at least linked to from your front page so that Search engines can fully spider your information. Also with very long pages, it's nice to have a links back to the top of the page. If you chose to re-design this way, you have a lot of work to do, and should get a good search and replace utility for all your current pages.

I'm not sure of your skill level. If you plan to move to a better host, and make use of SSI, Perl, PHP or ASP etc, my opinion is that you've gone to far into development on your free server.

Now that your there, you can still make use of your frames system and still be somewhat search engine friendly. You need to plan your layout so that it is consistent throughout. Don't make your home page in frames, and don't link your categories in new windows. With your main frame set you should make use of the noframes tag. Presently you have nothing but freehost advertising in your noframes tags. And build an HTML a site map. I'm not going to go to far into this because it can get indepth and complex. besides, personally I would go through the work of transforming the information out of frames. For the simple fact that, the further you go with it the more your stuck with it. A few resources,

http://www.websitemedics.com/frames/mainframe.html
http://www.wordsinarow.com/frames.html
http://www.highrankings.com/framedsite.htm (Jill Whalen)
http://www.searchengineguide.com/dale/2003/0224_d1.html

You may want to look a little further too.

Also you had mentioned searchable. Until you get located on a server with some programming, this is a good free service,

http://www.freefind.com/

I think there is a #pages limit on the free version, and believe they have an option to make a site map as well.

Have fun Tony,
Best regards.
Jim

[valk97_goose]

Hi Tony

My suggestions are as follows:

1. Get away from frames and build a template page.
2. Make use of active server pages (ASP) and a supporting database.

You may only need one or two actual pages.

You can then maintain your site via the database.

Regards...

[PBITech]

Exactly,

Actually I'm a perl fan, but it is an ugly language, and not the most popular. Learning, PHP or ASP, and how to maintain a database, before going any further is very good advice. For this you will need a hosting account with PHP or ASP, and hopefully an MySQL(database), to test your creations. I found it easier and quicker learning this stuff by installing it on my own machine, takes a bit of tinkering to get it rolling. You would need.

All free..
Apache server... http://www.apache.org/
PHP.................. http://www.php.net/
MySQL.............. http://www.mysql.com/
80 pots of coffee?

Ok maybe the coffee isn't free, and you should just skip that because we wouldn't want you to get an ulcer. There are plenty of places to learn these languages on the web for free as well :)

Good luck!
Jim

[tony]

Hey Thanks!!!

All very helpful...thanks for the suggestions. I am afraid I dont know my ASP from PHP but I am going to hit the books and see how to things go.So glad to get some feed back...Stay tuned for (more than likely) a bunch of questions....Ha!

Thank you

Tony

[tony]

I was just looking oveer this old message...As an update, the court ruled that due to manuscripts handed out prior to publiction A Course In Miracles is now in the Public Domain and after some work i have my new site http://courseinmiracles.com up and running and it receives about 200 word searches every week.
Thanks for all helpful advice