Tuesday 28 June 2011

More on Posts and Pages...

Thank you to Jim for his wise words. Apologies for not immediately taking up his suggestions. I want to concentrate on blogger for now, and get something really nice going on.

The way I've arranged things has both strengths and weaknesses.

The html gives me a lot of control over how things look, but I'm limited by the structure of blogger itself.

Essentially, I wanted tabs within the main page that would take the visitor to another page that had the same theme. Last time I did this sort of thing, I used a frameset. I suppose there might have been a way of doing that here. One for the future maybe, if doing things this way has a negative effect, as has been suggested to me privately.

Posts and pages get buried beneath the html stuff. They also sit upon a semi opaque background, in contrast to how the html stuff looks.

But there is a way around it!

Create other blogs, and put the required information into the html, just as it is on the main page. Then simply point the links to the right places and bob's yet bleedin uncle, innit?

The fail blog will have to stay page based, but that's OK. It cuts down on the work I have to do changing links and creating blogs. I will change it's appearence though to more or less match the rest. It's a bit dark as it is anyway.

Y'know? I'm really pleased with the way this is going. I think it looks nothing like a blog and with a bit more work, I will have something I can start promoting.

2 comments:

Jim Bliss said...

I've not used blogger in about 6 years, Paul, so I can't really advise you with regards to that platform. However, I would urge a degree of caution on your solution to the page problem... basically I'm not sure how having your site spread over several different domains will affect your search engine ranking (and presumably you'll be looking for a decent ranking as this is a revenue-generating website).

It may well not have a negative effect, but it's possible that it'll present problems.

Also, do be aware that there may be other search engine limitations with hosting your site on blogger. Do a search on "blogspot search optimisation" or some such thing and check out some of the articles. Again, it may not be a big issue - I just don't know how blogger works these days - but it's well worth investigating before you get too tied to the platform.

Jim Bliss said...

Hmm... I thought I'd posted a comment here and it didn't appear. Not sure what happened, but apologies if the same point appears twice.

Basically I was urging a little bit of caution with regards to spreading your site across multiple domains. It may not have a huge impact, but it might pose a problem with regards to search engine ranking (which I assume is important given the nature of the site).

And if I were you, I'd also search out some articles on optimising blogger sites for search engines as there appears to be some unique issues with them (they are all subdomains of a single top level domain which might - again, not having used blogger in about 6 years, it's not something I've researched so this is very much conjecture - cause problems).

Certainly worth looking into.