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hidenseek
25 Dec 2006, 11:03 PM
I have a site that is built purely from photoshop. I love the design and the way it looks, it navigates well, and even loads great. The problem is the search engines can't access the material on the pages. I am not that crazy with CSS or HTML (which is why I ended up doing a photoshop site in the first place). I am using a frontpage editor 2000 and I was wondering if there is anyway I can put the content of each page in a hidden format that the search engines can read? I am using meta tags, keywords and a good title for each page, all different. But the would like the actual content of each page to be readable by the search engines as well if possible. so curious if that can be done and what the code would be.

Also on an added note/question. About how low does it take for google to see changes made in your site?

alvo
26 Dec 2006, 01:18 PM
Search engines index text, so they probably won't be indexing your site, and if they do it will rank very low in the search results. Adding "hidden" text for them isn't going to work as they look for that and will disregard what they fine. People long ago tried to i***uence their ranking by adding additional text, often irrelevant to the site that way.
In addition you may be making it difficult or impossible for some people to use your site. Sight impaired people may have a problem (blind definitely will) and simply go elsewhere. Dial up users may not wait the length of time it takes everything to load and do the same. If your page is too large people with small browser windows or lower resolution monitors may give up on it as well rather than having to scroll to read everything. If the site is a personal one, then it probably doesn't matter much, but if it's a business or commerce site, then you're driving away potential customers that will be looking more at your competitor's sites.

Although not necessarily easy, it's possible to design good looking sites that work well within the limitations of web technology. It takes an understanding of how web pages work and how people use them to do it, but the rewards are worth the effort. Pages that flow to fit the available browser space and text that is not only indexable but available to people with sight problems is valuable in getting and retaining visitors. Designing pages as big pictures is trying to make the web into something more akin to printing where you control all the aspects of the finished presentation, something the web isn't designed to do.