SHTML Issue

Posted by coyotetrips

on 18 Mar 2012 10:37 AM

Hi all,

My name is Stefan and I'm a online volunteer as webmaster in Oregon for a German all volunteer fire department. However I'm not a web designer, my low skill levels are self taught.

Years back I set up the fire dept.'s website as frames (http://www.fwhg.de), and am now in the process converting it to shtml.

I'm facing the same issue that I had with the frames: if you come from a search engine or a deep link, you are outside the frame set and don't see the menu. I included a little script that would always bring you to the home page to include the menu, but I never liked it, as it prevents links to individual pages.

Now with shtml a link to a individual page could also result in not displaying the menu and header.

Is there a work around for this issue?

Thank you for your help!
Stefan

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Posted by Christian_SEO

on 18 Mar 2012 2:40 PM

shtml and frames are two completely different things. Changing from HTML to SHTML is not going to eliminate the frames unless you change how the site is designed.

I suggest that you stop using frames on your site or if you don't want to do that there are other scripts that will allow the page to "re-frame" itself.

I don't know if this will work for you but what I have in my files is this that would be added to each framed page and the correct framed URL would be added:

<!--
<script>
if (parent.location.href==self.location.href){
window.location.href='www.fwhg.de/.../index.htm&
}
</script>
-->

A better solution would be to use PHP which your hosting should support. Using PHP you can have includes which I think you may be using now and there is not much you will have to learn to make it work. Your site should be easier to maintain with PHP includes and it will give you access to many commands and functions in the future..

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Posted by coyotetrips

on 18 Mar 2012 6:10 PM

Chris,

Thanks for the reply.

Of course I want to get rid of the frames, that's why I want to switch to SHTML/SSI.

Something like this for the home page:

<tr>

<td>

<tr>

</tr>

<tr>

</tr>

</table>

</td>

</tr>

</table>

I'm just afraid that a search engine would deep link to the page "startseite-new.htm" and it would then show up without the menu and header. How can I prevent this?

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Posted by Christian_SEO

on 19 Mar 2012 9:11 PM

You could do what you are thinking, but I think you will want to modify your design.

First of all, if there are no links in your new site to the pages you are using as shtml includes, then the risk of someone finding them in a search engine is low. The search engines will not see those pages that are being included in your page. When the page is rendered for the browser, the "" will be replaced by the content in the file that is being called for the menu. Do a test page and you should see this is true.

To make sure this does not happen, you can put all of your include files into a folder like /inc and then use the robots.txt file to tell bots and spiders to specifically NOT index those files. But for bots and spiders, if there is no link to a file that exists, they have no way to find it.

The other thing I want to mention is that your includes should not be complete stand alone web pages but only have what is needed for the specific part of the page that you want to have. So no <html> or <Head> tags, just stuff that would go between the <body> tags. Sorry if you know that but I could not tell for sure.

Lastly, using SSI is fine, but you may be limiting yourself for the future if you need more functionality at some point. Using PHP and not SSI will allow you to do many more things and the include function is just as easy as it is with SSI. :-)

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Posted by coyotetrips

on 19 Mar 2012 9:29 PM

Thanks for the info. I'll look into PHP, and if it really isn't much harder to learn (for me) then I might as well go with it.

Thanks,

Stefan

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