Would SE's mind if I upload a test copy of only one page of CSS to be reviewed by the review section of this board?

I have about 180 pages and I'd like feedback from board members on my changes from html to xhtml and CSS for just one page before repeating my mistakes on many pages.

I have been working on my index page first. Would it be better for me to upload a duplicate with a title such as testpage.html and have no meta tags so I could get feedback on that?

Thanks.
Betsy at
Learning Abilities Books
Preschool through Fifth Grade Educational Resources
[ Edited -- URL moved to signature ]

You've already got a link on here - which should be in a signature.

If your file names and content aren't going to change from when you post the test to when the site goes live - you have nothing to woory abou (unless you're using a lot of hidden elements and negative margins)

otherwise - create a test page with null links (<a href='#'>....</a>)

I didn't realize I was duplicating the URL because it would appear automatically in my signature.
Sorry I wasn't more observant.

I don't even know about hidden elements and negative margins so I assume that's no problem.

Are you saying my links pointing to other pages need to be changed to 
<a href='#'>Bookstore</a>
<a href='#'>Catalog</a> and so forth?

How about links for images?

G'day labooks. Welcome to the forum.

So, you're going over to xhtml and css, for sure, aren't you. So is it working on your hard drive? OK. Upload the two new files to the web and let's have a look. It's bound to need some work since it's your first try.

So you get some advice and follow it. Eventually you'll have the content right, the xhtml template right and the css file right. Then it will be time to use your template to create more xhtml pages and upload them. Simple as that.

It won't matter that one page is xhtml and the rest html. I think that's what you're worried about.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Best wishes,
Laurie.

Yes, I'm taking the plunge into the water.

I was concerned about some pages being CSS and xhtml and some not. There are some pages which have a different format such as lessons. Eventually, I'll probably make them PDF's.

This is the page I uploaded.
http://www.learningbooks.net/indextestpage.html

I don't like the looks of the lower half of the page. I know part of the problem is because of using blue body bkground.

Can I keep the body bkground code?
Can I change the lower half back to a table?

The page I uploaded is a revision of my index page. (I've made it more compact.) For comparison, you might want to look at it in my signature especially regarding the lower half of the page.

Thanks,
Betsy

PS I intentionally made my links just <a href="#">. Images show OK. I thought I'd mention that so you'd save time by realizing I know how to fix the links.

G'day labooks.

Here are a couple of things you might wish to change:

1)  Most, but not all, of your "div id"s should be "div class"es. You use an id only once per page but classes can be used repeatedly.

Show them as

.contentcenter

instead of

#contentcenter

in the css file.

Show them as

<div class="contentcenter">

in the xhtml code.

2)  Ideally, your css should be in a separate file, linked to from the xhtml page, but what you have is OK for now.

3)  For SEO purposes, you would be well advised to have your h1 first, h2 second and then your h3.

Hand in hand with that, you should have your page title/headline first as the h1, your subheading as h2 second. I wouldn't have the nav as h3 or h anything, and put it after the page heading and subheading.

You can tell the h1, h2, and h3 what size to be in the css.

Have only one h1. That's your page heading/title/headline. The most important couple of words on the whole page. First and biggest!

4)  The background colour should be in the css file. That way you can change the background, for the whole site, with just a little change to the one css file, which will be separate from the xhtml file.

5)  To clarify: you should have one css file for the whole website ( you can have more than one but you won't need to). You link to this css file from every xhtml page. That's one of the beauties of css. You make a change to one file, the css file, and consistently change the look of the whole site. Don't know if you understood that.

6)  Not sure what you're saying about having a table for the bottom part. You should be able to have the whole website without one single, solitary table. If TA or CE come along they might help you. They're both pretty good at these things.

Please don't be disheartened. Your test site isn't looking too bad at all, and the css issues are not too great.

Believe me, I've seen far worse! Far worse!

Regards,
Laurie.

Thanks for your pointers and your encouragement.
I’ll work on them but I have some questions.

1. You said to have my page title/headline as the first h1.  Do I need to get rid of my banner? I’m fond of it. That is the only place in the body which shows the name of the site (it is also in the meta tags.)

2. If I keep the banner, should I repeat the site title? (Under the banner in h2, I have two lines which basically summarize the site and use popular keywords for my topics.)

3. Speaking of meta tags, I do keep them in the head, right? (Title, content, and description are all I have. Oops I also have ones from places such as “approved as a family friendly site.”)

4.  Do I put this in css for the background color?
<body bgcolor="#c8e3f6" link="#0d63c3" vlink="#c50b21">
I tried it and on my computer, I couldn’t see the difference with or without this code.

5. I have static width:650px centered. With this style, will the background only cover 650px? (I doubt if I used the proper code for bgcolor for css.)

6. I experimented with how the page looked on smaller monitors when I used some of the samples given at  http://www.glish.com/css/ which DMX listed on another thread.  The examples were very helpful. However, on a small screen, some of them covered each other or the third column bounced down. Static style was the only one which I tried which did not do this. Are there some styles which would avoid this problem on small monitors and would make the whole screen the color of my choice on large monitors?
   
7. My question about the table was that (on my computer) the blue background jutted into space where it should not have been when I used bgcolor in my head. (Maybe that problem will be solved with the right code for bgcolor. )
A table would keep that from happening. I finally became rather good at using tables and hate to see them go. (I’ve done this for a few years just knowing a few basic html codes but not having any real training.) What would be the problems with keeping some tables?

I'm retired and I'm selling a few books I've written (as well as books by other people). I didn't expect to spend so much time working on my site.

Again, thanks for the tips and encouragement.
Betsy

I'm still working on the suggestions.
The two books I've gotten are over my head although one is clearer than the other.

I found a site which said to use
body {background-color: #c8e3f6;}
(this was my choice of the shade of blue),
but there are still gaps of white and blue.
This is the site.
http://www.htmlite.com/CSS007.php

I haven't uploaded any changes yet. I have visited your site, Laurie.
I see how you put the name above the image. Perhaps I could do that with my banner.

G'day again labooks.

The SE doesn't see the image. The banner is an image. Any thing between <these symbols> isn't seen by the SE.

Get it clear in your mind what a search engine is and what a browser is. The browser sees everything.

So it doesn't matter a lot if your banner is first or not. The SE sees the alt text in the banner/image. Be sure the alt text features your keyword for the site.

What's more important is that you have your h1 as the first text content and your h2 as the second text content.

So here's how I do it:

1)  The home page is about what the whole site is about. Nothing more and nothing less.

2)  Every other page is about what that page is about. Nothing more and nothing less.

3)  Choose your title, description and file name carefully, with these in mind.

4)  In the head.
Title - featuring your keyterm.
Description - an expansion of the title, featuring the keyterm.

5)  On the page.
Repeat the title as the h1 heading.
Repeat the description as the h2 subheading.

6)  Further down the page use h3 and possibly h4 as well, as further subheadings.

7)  I think the reason you are having trouble with the fluid css template is that you have specified a width for your div ids (which should be div classes). I think you'd be better off with a static template at this stage.

That's enough homework at this stage. Let's see how you go with that.

I think you need to immerse yourself in a basic, free, online, css tutorial. You seem to have not yet grasped some of the important basics of a css driven site. http://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/basics.html This is mainly a html tutorial but has some very basic css as well. Should give you a good start.

Go back to the original template, as it was provided, and use it without multiple extra divs.

By all means, keep asking questions. However, keep in mind that we'll need to see evidence that you are applying the advice given.

Now labooks, I have a very important question: Why do you want to change over to css?

When I was a lad, my dad taught me an important life lesson. He said: Son, if it aint broke, then don't fix it.

There's a false rumour about that a css site goes better in the search engine results pages (SERPs). If thats motivating you, then forget it. 180 pages is going to take a lot of work to change over. However, if your whole site is back the front with the headings, it would be a good time to fix both at once.

However, if your site is doing well in the SERPs as it is, you could destroy your business by fiddling.

Just one more thing for you to consider for now: Your original site has the blocky look of a table based site. You seem to going all out to maintain that blocky look in the css page, where in fact, you have the freedom to make the page much more appealing.

So, you see, I think it's important for you to have a good think about what you want to accomplish, and why.

Now there's a pretty tough response. Hope you're not offended.

Best wishes,
Laurie.

Dear Laurie,

Why do I want to change over to css? I thought my site was broken! I certainly hope it isn’t. I subscribe to 3 ezines about website promotion, etc. including Site Reference. I don’t understand a lot of what is said. Somehow I got the impression that CSS would improve rank! Hoping I was wrong, I tried to find the ezines or items in an online search to see where I got that idea.

No luck. Well, maybe it is lucky that I didn’t find them. You could save me a lot of time and trouble. Maybe I can get back to site promotion  and forget about css.

I have gotten some help from the ezines such as finding out about this forum and finding some tips that  have helped.

My big concern with rank happened this way. In Nov. of ‘05, I changed to a commercial site at Earthlink because my “free” ($2.00 monthly) site for using Earthlink as my ISP exceeded the traffic allowance 3  times causing it to be offline for a few days at the end of 3 months. Each time, Earthlink warned me that I this might happen because of so much traffic.

I didn’t know about a server side redirect! I just put an html link on the old page. Yes! It got lost.
After about 5 months, an article in a website promotion ezine made me realize the need for 301 redirect!

That has helped but even with “too much traffic” to my “free” site, I only got an average of 20% of traffic from search engines. I have many articles, lessons, links, etc. posted on sites of other people and in directories. My traffic dropped to about 1% from SE’s and now it is back up to an average of 6%. I’m eager to get it back up to 20% or more.

My site is definitely designed for the human visitor rather than the SE’s partly because I don’t know much about SE’s. I expanded it with very basic html knowledge including meta tags. The expansions made it necessary to redesign the visual layout.  I lost some of the good design which my daughter made 10 years ago. (She is an artist who has done a little site design for her employer at a university but that isn’t her main job by any means.) During Christmas, she suggested several things I should do to make the site more “visitor friendly,” i. e. human visitors.

Here are my css changes which aren’t appealing to the eye on my computer.

http://www.learningbooks.net/indextestpage.html

Blue still juts into what I would call table columns in html terminology.
The only way I knew to center the song title near the bottom was to use html center tags.

Questions:

1. What do you think of my using a few SE preferences such h1, strong, em, but keeping basic html coding and forgetting about css? I do like the new arrangement of the title above the banner and major links below it as you suggested.

2. Would the SE’s like for me to consolidate some tables? Sometimes I close one then create a new one below it for visual effects but I could do the same thing with rowspan.

3. Should I change to xhtml? I had the idea that html was being phased out! That’s another reason for my interest in xhtml and css.

The only changes I routinely make are a new article, book, or lesson on a single page. I also add to my “What’s New” page. I don’t need css to update two pages!

If I knew more about what I was doing, I might consider your reply as a “rough response” as you said. However, I don’t and I’m not offended at all. I do feel comfortable with my knowledge of html but I know that is on an elementary level as well.

Thanks,
Betsy

G'day Betsy.

Try this in place of your h1, h2 and h3. If you like the difference you can play around with it.

h1

{font-family: verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size:13pt; margin-bottom:4px; margin-top:0px; text-align: center;}

h2

{font-family: verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size:11pt; margin-bottom:4px; margin-top:0px;}

h3

{font-family: verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size:10pt; margin-bottom:4px; margin-top:0px;}

You can centre the h2 if you want, the same as the h1. Change the font size.

Your test page is looking much better. That is: the page and the code.

Let's know whether you're serious about going to css.

I see your site is all over the place, not two pages designed the same. Not good for humans. SE's don't care. If you want to address this, you'll need to alter and upload every page, a mamoth task. This would be the time to change to xhtml, css. I wouldn't be doing it, myself.

You have done valuable work, lots of it, over the years, with your articles and forum posts. They all point to your free site. It's the URL they point to, that's the web address.

One good option would be to put the site back on the free site and pay the money to upgrade to a comercial site at the same URL.

However, if you wish to continue with your current URL, you can go all out getting your link around as you did in the past with the free site.

You need to do some keyword reserch using Overture Keyword Selector and Google in combination.

About you question in another post about links. Keep away from dodgy and questionable linking practices, designed to fool the SEs.

Using a css driven site won't help your rankings.

Get an understanding of page rank (PR) (TBPR) and ranking in the SERPs. Different alltogether.

Your visit to these educational sites will help promote the LAB site by improving its rank. Thanks.

Sorry. This is not correct.

Regards,
Laurie.

Dear Laurie,

Thanks again for all of the information and for the kind words about the content of my site.

My daughter used your words exactly to describe how I've messed up her site design: "The site is all over the place." I didn't intend to mess things up. As I added new pages, they didn't fit the original format. I no longer even have a copy of that. She will be interested in your description. She is thirty and I'm retired so you can guess my age. Unfortunately, she is in graduate school and doesn't have time for giving me much help but I can get a few suggestions from time to time. She taught me some html and gave me HTML-4 by Elizabeth Castro. "A little learning is a dangerous thing."

If css won't improve my page rank, I will be very, very glad to skip it!

1. Is html being phased out?

2. Are the advantages to xhtml worth the trouble?

3. I probably should change some pages such as lessons and puzzles to pdf's. How can I use keywords in a pdf?

One day, I hope to submit my site for review on this board but I see a lot of design work I need to do first. I'm glad I
started by asking about just one page! I'll deal with some of my questions in new posts and other research. I need to spend some time on the thread about page design, etc.

Earthlink would not let me use the free site's URL for my commercial site. Also they would do a server-side redirect only for the index page. I have contacted numerous people about changing their links to my site. About half of them have done it.

Originally, I had every page of the old site linking to the corresponding page of the new site. (I learned that many
people link to pages other than my homepage.) After reading about spamming practices, I changed all of those pages to link to the redirect (index) page on the old site. (yes, one by one)

4. Does server-side 301 redirect count the links to the old site? I thought it did.

I've tried several places for help with keywords but they weren't very helpful. Thanks for these suggestions: Overture
Keyword Selector and Google in combination.

5. Are the following considered dodgy and questionable linking practices?
(a) award winners listed on my personal site while the winners' sites link back to the commercial site
(b) links for non-award winners on the links page my writers' site at geocities

I suspect that (a) is but perhaps (b) is not. (a) resembles the rest of the site but (b) is a completely different site with a few educational links, writers' links, and general links.

6. I have buttons for 4 auto-ranking board sites, for example: http://teachers.teach-nology.com/index.html which is Best on the Web for Teachers. I introduce them with this statement: "Your visit to these educational sites will help promote the LAB site by improving its rank. Thanks." Should I specify "... by improving its rank on these auto-ranking sites" or just say "...will help promote the LAB site?"

I hope the search engines don't mind my using these auto-ranking sites. They are relevant to my topics and they send a lot of traffic to my site. Also, they have a lot of educational content beyond the ranking pages. They are not just for links. I have thought of creating one for my site.

Thanks for the code which you sent for h1 etc. I haven't used it yet because I thought it just referred to css.

7. Can h1 etc. be used without css? I uploaded a new test page
http://www.learningbooks.net/indextestwtable.html
with h1, h2, and with tables. The whole cell is centered after each <h2></h2>. I don't know why h2 is centered except that the whole table is centered. When I don't center the table, the contents are no longer centered.

The old test page is still online.


Thanks,
Betsy

Oh Betsy!

You weave a complicated web.

We started out with you wanting to change over to a css driven website. As I guessed, you were acting on the false rumour that the change would "fix" your site's traffic problems. OK, we've dispelled that nonsence.

As the plot unfolds, I find many things that I would call abnormalities. Many are beyond my ability. I can have a bit of a guess, but you need better advice that I can give.

1)  Your on-page SEO is up the spout a bit, but we're getting that straightened out. That's simple enough.

2)  I think that some aspects of your link profile are up the spout, but I'm really out of my depth on this.

3)  I think the relationship between the old site and the new one is your worst enemy. Again, I'm out of my depth here.

4)  There are people on this forum, well able to guide you, but they have not chimed in. I suspect that they've seen at a glance that you have a complicated set of unfortunate decisions and occurrences, and are way out of your depth.

5)  I think you need to spend a few hundred bucks on some expert, professional assistance. You need an SEO expert, not a web designer. Designing a nice looking web page is the least of your problems.

6)  I sugest that you PM The Gypsey and Northie and ask them to give their opinion on points 2 to 5 above. They've probibly seen this thread in it's early days and jumped back in horror. They've left me to be the mug to carry the can.

Now Betsy, my intention is not to crush you or hurt you in any way. I see lots of good things about your website and I think that If you can get it back on track it will provide a valuable contribution to the community at large. I see you have a heart for educating children and that you care for those with special needs. I can see also that you're a real nice person.

Best Wishes,
Laurie.

Just think, this all began by my having too much traffic to my free site!

I'll give thought to your points. Thanks for your patience and for speaking up. Thanks also for your thoughtful appreciation of my efforts to help children, parents, and other educators.

So long,
Betsy