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[Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Hello,
so here is a suggesition how easy a H1, H2 Heading can be implemented in the program only if you want to - the basic and individual formatings for each H1, H2...entry should be made in the Web Properties window and it should be then directly implemented in the program like both graphics showing.
Michael
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
AbsoLUTEly!
This is an essential asset to ANY program calling itself a "Web Design" application. Especially nowadays, if it's trying to conform to the html/css WC3 web standards. We NEED to have specific, valid Web standards design control over all text used in a Website.
I'm glad you brought this up Michael. This is a MUST DO for the first program update.
Nice catch.
Mark...
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
I think this is an excellent idea too. It would be very intuitive way to apply some pre-defined properties and seems that the WYSIWYG goals could be maintained.
Regards, Ross
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Brilliant! I support this.
Tom
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Well I really do not want to get into the argument about HTML structure (suffice to say John is completely right), but until someone can show any merit or any benefit at all in having H1 tags, this is not something we'd offer.
Why would we start complicating the product with some technical gubbins that few people will understand, especially when it has no actual benefit?
I agree that it would be nice to have more powerful text Style control in Xtreme and Web Designer, but that's really a completely separate issue, and one day we'll add it.
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Charles Moir
I agree that it would be nice to have more powerful text Style control in Xtreme and Web Designer, but that's really a completely separate issue...
I'm sorry but I thought "text style control" was Michael was proposing. As I understood his suggestion the various text styles associated with the pull-down would be specified in options and they'd then be exported as part of the style sheet. Then in Xara-WD when you could easily apply that "style" to subsequent selections knowing you are keeping things consistent. To me its not about the whole "clean" html stuff but about convenience and the intuitiveness of the interface.
Regards, Ross
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Sure, OK. Text Styles will appear in Xtreme / WD one day. As usual there's a ton of things on our wish list still.
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
There is a huge conceptual difference between the styles concept as it is commonly accepted in the typesetting and design world and the header levels implemented in html. Styled concept is based on the full customisability, html is not. Just as in most other aspects, html inventors tried to mock up something good, but as usually screwed it up due to their limited understanding of the concept and/or simplification of the implementation. For example, as we are talking about headers, there are only 6 strictly sequential levels allowed.
Later, some heavy artillery expansion of the html (popularly known as CSS) added huge amount of doubling functionality together with redundant expressiveness, some new ambiguities and open holes in possibilities here and there. But the headers left as they were, plain dumb and ridiculously outdated. While they could add an CSS attribute for the structured level of the element, they didn't. So now, the html is proudly named of being structured if it has header elements. Great for headers. But what about the paragraph text? Illustrations? What level they belong too? W3C can't give you an answer. To the last header probably... Well, this is not how structuring is done. Even RTF is ages ahead, though it is actually an older format.
Sorry for my rant, but I think not everyone understand how utterly bad html actually is. All I said is just a tiny microscopic piece of this enormous hype of misconceptions commonly called html.
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Yes, but what do you think of HTML covoxer?.. ;-)
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Quote:
Originally Posted by
pauland
Yes, but what do you think of HTML covoxer?.. ;-)
What do you mean? :rolleyes:
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Charles Moir
...having H1 tags, this is not something we'd offer.
Why would we start complicating the product with some technical gubbins that few people will understand, especially when it has no actual benefit?
HI Charles,
i'm totally on your site, and i want it to make it easier from the users point of view:
Why not offer 6 different types of Headings wich can be preformated wich are saving time rapidly instead of:
Marking the text and click 14pix bold on every heading wich i create in my website - i do only one time the formating and save time for my whole site:
Just imagine: The Xara Web Designer Demo Page and take each Heading you used in your site:
and imagine you only have to click on the beginning of the Heding and click Heading1 and rapidly the whole line changed into bold 14 red - formating - this saves more time and you have not to argue /tell about H1, h2 and so on stuff:
Use your own preformatted Headings and save much more time as you format every Heading manually AND combine this with a much more better ranking in search-engines!
What is in this case complicated - i do lessons in NetObjects Fusion since 2000 and believe me no one of my customers understand what a H1 Heading really is they only know they are saving time with preformatted settings and beside the chances of getting a better search enging ranking rised....
So our goal together should be to offer a much more and better and faster handling of Headlines for websites and my suggestion does this and i think from a programmers point of view there should be no complicated way to implement this; isn't it???
I am the last one that say: Hey make XWD to a complete HTML Editor no that is not my point - make a easy and fast program more userfriendly and give it an additional feature to save the users time
Michael
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Charles Moir
Well I really do not want to get into the argument about HTML structure (suffice to say John is completely right), but until someone can show any merit or any benefit at all in having H1 tags, this is not something we'd offer.
Why would we start complicating the product with some technical gubbins that few people will understand, especially when it has no actual benefit?
I agree that it would be nice to have more powerful text Style control in Xtreme and Web Designer, but that's really a completely separate issue, and one day we'll add it.
Yes, I've been silently dying for a powerful text Style feature for ages (the first thing I use in Word pretty much before producing a document).
I totally agree about all this h1 heading stuff. I don't see how it's essential; like you say it's just complicating things and adding nothing. I first came across this crap when trying to sell stuff on eBay, and having to learn how to make a heading bold using all stupid <h1> tags and other unintuitive techno gibberish that just makes the experience so repellent and time consuming. A simple WYSIWYG text editor was embarrassingly missing.
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
I think that while we may be talking about HTML headings, really we're talking about a way to get a consistent look and feel throughout the website. If I use word I try and get all my headings at different levels the same and I can switch the style consistently.
I guess that for heading support we'd be looking at specifying point sizes and colour attributes too. Naturally, if you can do that for headings, why not paragraphs?
It might be useful for release 2.0 since it's a nice to have, but not really essential. It would be nice to have in Xtreme too.
Technically I guess it's just a CSS setting for the header tags and paragraph styles or div styles. I suspect it's one of those things that would quickly move from 'nice to have' to 'essential' once it became a habit to use it - particularly in larger websites or documents.
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
When we implement styles system in Xtreme/WD it will probably be more like the one used in Word than html. I don't think wi'll limit anyone to 6 levels e.t.c.
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Please do introduce a style feature to WD. I have been designing a site over the weekend and have wanted to experiment with different body and heading font styles. To make the changes across the whole site requires manual editing of every page using the text tool. Ideally I would like to be able to make changes to the whole site by just editing a style list (as in Word).
When creating a new document in Word, I always use the 'outlining' view to get the structure of the document correct, then, when the document is complete I can tweak the styles so that the document looks the way I want it to. I'd like to be able to work in a similar way using WD.
To me, this is not a question about the merits of using <h1><h2> HTML tags. The way that WD decides to export the HTML code is a decision that the Xara developers need to make in order that the page renders correctly in all web browsers.
Rich
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Quote:
When we implement styles system in Xtreme/WD it will probably be more like the one used in Word than html. I don't think wi'll limit anyone to 6 levels e.t.c.
That would save a lot of time. :D
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
With my limited knowledge of the English language (if all of the above is any English at all) I am not really sure that my feelings about having to add a text style feature to WD is shared by the major part of fellow users. To me it is so obvious and necessary to just have to select a piece of text and then give it a predefined look and not have to copy the style from another piece of text I already formatted.
Apart from this: WD is an excellent program. Good job!
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
I think WD and Xtreme are still finding their feet after moving from being single page programs to handling multiple pages. If everything is right in front of you on a single page, styles aren't as important as they would be if content is spread over multiple pages.
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
I think you have a valid point there Paul. For me, text styles were never an issue until XXP became multi-page. As XWD was based heavily on Xtreme's code base it has inherited this omission.
Rich
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Charles Moir
... until someone can show any merit or any benefit at all in having H1 tags, this is not something we'd offer ...
This might throw some light on the subject, it seems to imply that heading tags do have an impact on SEO.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM
Drwyd
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Drwyd
it seems to imply that heading tags do have an impact on SEO.
Not at all. Not a single word about SEO. That was an answer on the question about how many headers it is best to have per page. And the answer was in the reader friendliness plane, not SEO influence.
Typical advice regarding reasonable design.
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<h> tags ESSENTIAL to proper indexing of site
To say the <h> tags are non-essential is incorrect. The textual hierarchy of your content should be defined by <h> tags because the search engines use the <h> tag to better index the content of your site.
Matches between meta-tags and <h> tags in your text are invaluable for indexing, especially for deep searches which will become the internet norm.
Think <h> tags with you are putting text on your site - particularly when it matches anything in your meta-tags.
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Re: <h> tags ESSENTIAL to proper indexing of site
Quote:
Originally Posted by
richinri
To say the <h> tags are non-essential is incorrect. The textual hierarchy of your content should be defined by <h> tags because the search engines use the <h> tag to better index the content of your site.
Matches between meta-tags and <h> tags in your text are invaluable for indexing, especially for deep searches which will become the internet norm.
Think <h> tags with you are putting text on your site - particularly when it matches anything in your meta-tags.
Can you provide an authoritative reference confirming your statements?
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Study html, and proper coding of web pages - this is no secret. This was the purpose of <h> tags from the beginning. Everybody thinks it was for appearance only but not so. It was to properly organize your text to maximize organization for the web.
The internet runs on visuals but is indexed by plain text. <h> tags, alt and title attributes, meta-tags and, of course, text which are all congruent will greatly assist people finding you for your exact content. This is the sort of stuff SEO companies charge people a lot for. They always "alter" the page and these are a few of the things they pay attention to.
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Quote:
Originally Posted by
richinri
The internet runs on visuals but is indexed by plain text.
Wouldn't that be "The Web runs on visuals" ?
The internet was around before the WWW was..
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Quote:
Originally Posted by
richinri
Study html, and proper coding of web pages - this is no secret. This was the purpose of <h> tags from the beginning. Everybody thinks it was for appearance only but not so. It was to properly organize your text to maximize organization for the web.
The internet runs on visuals but is indexed by plain text. <h> tags, alt and title attributes, meta-tags and, of course, text which are all congruent will greatly assist people finding you for your exact content. This is the sort of stuff SEO companies charge people a lot for. They always "alter" the page and these are a few of the things they pay attention to.
OK you do not have any authoritative reference. I must assume this is all your personal opinion. What an SEO company charges for is not necessarily any proof that it is effective. It is only what they can convince a customer they need.
Please do not try to confuse issues with your personal opinion.
Answers provided by Covoxer are authoritative in reference to Web Designer. He is part of the Xara Ltd development staff and made the HTML export filter.
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Does anyone have an authoritative reference? In support of either view?
Richinri's position seems to be the dominant view amongst the vast majority of SEO professionals and parallels every thing I have read over the last year but finding definitive proof (either way) is proving to be elusive.
I very much hope that Covoxer is right; I can then design in XWD safe in the knowledge that I am not putting myself (and my clients) at a disadvantage as regards SE ranking.
Drwyd
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Is Google an authoritative reference enough in this case?
see http://www.talkgraphics.com/showpost...4&postcount=17
Regards,
Remi
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Like I said, this is no secret. 13 years of doing this stuff has taught me a few things. What does the H in the <h> tag stand for? HEADER. Designing at present in XWD MIGHT negatively affect your SE ranking IF you choose to ignore the code completely. This has been my point in many posts.
As soon as text is grouped - it becomes a graphic. This means your text is not analyzed by the SE and I doubt the alt or title tag will help much as a SE replacement for paragraphs of text.
The thinking that one can design away graphically without any code consideration is an unfulfilled pipe dream at present.
If one keeps a few things in mind - there is no reason you can't use XWD without concern about SE rankings. XWD has placeholders - great. But you can screw up your page big time by putting in invalid code.
I was playing around with some nice graphic fonts I have the other day and had a bunch of text on a page - all grouped so I could get that same font whether the person viewing had the font or not. I then realized ALL the text on my site was now a graphic. Not good for the SE, so I ungrouped the text and made other design decisions that I could live with.
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
No one knows how exactly search engines work. But, based on known facts we can make some reasonable assumptions.
Fact 1. The most important goal of good SE is to provide user with correct information regarding site content.
Fact 2. The content that user sees may differ greatly from the html code.
Fact 3. Now it is almost 100% known that search engines ignore 'description' meta tag. The reason is that it's content is not what user sees. Using this tag was an easy way to fool SE and make it fail it's main goal (Fact 1.).
Fact 4. The <h1> element is not user visible. It is easy to make text within it look like a paragraph text or even be completely invisible. If SE would rely on it, it would provide another way to fool the SE just the way description metatag did.
Fact 5. The Google guide does not guarantee that anything recommended will be used by SE. Read carefully, they don't make such claims. These are just general recommendations similar to W3C. Not a single word about how SE will interpret these tags.
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Most importantly have a good website name. This will drive the most traffic to your site! It seems that the engines want to make developers do more and more work every day. It looks like site maps are the way of the future. If Xara could implement sitemap development into the program then all of us would be way ahead of the game:rolleyes:
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Do you mean stuff like www.sexy_site_without_h1.com", for example?
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
The site maps can not directly influence site rating. However they are very useful to optimize search bot crawling over your site. Using sitemaps you can make sure that even less popular pages of your site are updated operatively, and that on search request SE will return the correct page form your site.
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Quote:
Originally Posted by
richinri
Like I said, this is no secret. 13 years of doing this stuff has taught me a few things. What does the H in the <h> tag stand for? HEADER.
Search engines are constantly being updated. What may work to optimize your site today may be ineffective tomorrow.
At one time keywords were touted as being a way to have your site ranked high in search results.
SEO companies and individuals began padding too many keywords that were not related to the site contents.
Header tags are also being over used and will become ignored (or are already being ignored) by search engines.
Almost any information you can read about how to optimize your site is most likely already being ignored by a modern search engine.
Code to strip html tags from text are old hat and were before World Wide Web was even a commonly used catch phrase. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) predates WWW.
Richinri please stop disrupting threads by repeating your manta of <h> tags. If you continue the alternative is to be banned from the forums.
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Quote:
Originally Posted by
covoxer
No one knows how exactly search engines work. But, based on known facts we can make some reasonable assumptions.
Fact 1. The most important goal of good SE is to provide user with correct information regarding site content.
Fact 2. The content that user sees may differ greatly from the html code.
Fact 3. Now it is almost 100% known that search engines ignore 'description' meta tag. The reason is that it's content is not what user sees. Using this tag was an easy way to fool SE and make it fail it's main goal (Fact 1.).
Fact 4. The <h1> element is not user visible. It is easy to make text within it look like a paragraph text or even be completely invisible. If SE would rely on it, it would provide another way to fool the SE just the way description metatag did.
Fact 5. The Google guide does not guarantee that anything recommended will be used by SE. Read carefully, they don't make such claims. These are just general recommendations similar to W3C. Not a single word about how SE will interpret these tags.
Maybe I can make a contribution by relaying an actual recent experience I had with SEO. This is a little long winded but may help some people who are interested in real world practical experiences.
Background:
I have been doing some work on our Company website to update content. (we are 30 employees and we all "do what it takes"). As head of business development with programming experience, that fell to me. The website was developed in php and is css based (partially implemented). - I say "partially" because no header tags were utilized to manage the content - just p tags and div tags.
Searches to find our site would only find us if the actual Company name was keyed in and we could not be found (via Google and Yahoo) via key phrases - other than specifically one of our product names. ie. Only our existing customers could find us!
Goals:
1. Add new product information to the site.
2. Try to get search engines to find us and our new "killer app".
What I did:
I added a couple of new software product pages and updated the home page to reflect our new initiatives.
I modified the code using Expression Web2 which supports php. Incidentally, as an aside, there was no benefit in our case of the code being in PHP using javascript and arrays and the like, so making the changes was very difficult and involved getting an outsider to modify Photoshop images etc. Anyway - enough technical stuff.
As I was learning EW2 and also preparing to build some new sites myself I was submerging myself in books - including "Search Engine Optimization - Your Visual Blueprint for Effective Internet marketing." Wiley.
Here's what they say about SEO and h1 tags. - page 44.
"beyond using header tags to highlight text on your pages, you can use them to logically format your content into hierarchial topics and subtopics".
"placing a selection of text within a header tag tells the search-engine spider that the text is of a certain level of importance".
"Do not expect drastic increases in rankings for keywords and phrases highlighted by header tags, but always try to use them wherever appropriate in your web page creation. You are providing a service to both the search engines and your visitors by visualizing the important topics."
As a result of my reading and the generalities made towards the methods used by SEs to crawl and rank sites, I decided to make SEO changes in steps.
First I decided to get a more meaningful title to the home page and then make sure the meta description and meta keywords all reflected the key attributes of the new software initiative. Secondly I made sure the home page content utilized the same expressions - sometimes in bold - and that the content clearly supported in great detail the words used in the tags. i.e do the emphasizing stuff but not via header tags at this point. Each of these things can of course be done via the web properties tab in WD!:D
At this point I decided to re-launch the site and come back later and start using h1 tags etc. I had no idea if my efforts would help with SEO.
Results:
2 weeks after re-launch our site can now be found on the first page of Google and Yahoo (#1 hit) using a number of the expressions I put in the title, description and keyword tags and the also the content!!!
Next Steps:
I will modify each of our pages so that can be individually found, rather than just the home page.
To be continued -
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Thanks Catman - it is posts like those that will take XWD forward despite the arrogance of some that think their knowledge is everything. One can design web design software but not develop good websites. People like us have been developing websites for years. Personally I know little to nothing about developing web site software. In any business it is important to know both what you know and what you do not know.
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Continued:
It is interesting to see that a search for WYSIWYG Web Design Software does not yield a Xara hit - even if preceeded by Xara :(. A quick look at the page source and the general meta tag descriptions and the page content seems to suggest why there is no direct hit.
Text Tags (h1 or otherwise):
SEO aside I agree wholeheartedly with the original poster. There can be no argument against making text content easier to manage - so long as its done within the context of a user friendly wysiwyg environment. Who knows - Google may tomorrow change the rules of the game and they become mandatory. Easily managing multipage site business sites (not necessarily huge ones) is critical where consistency and periodic refreshes are required. Being easy to develop, looking good and also being easily found are all important aspects of web site management.
WD is a terrific product and should be eating up market share at its price point. It's a hidden secret and I only knew about it because I found and had a license for Xara Extreme. This site is terrific and I thank everyone for their contributions which are awesome. I look forward to every new feature in the product:).
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Soquili
Search engines are constantly being updated. What may work to optimize your site today may be ineffective tomorrow.
At one time keywords were touted as being a way to have your site ranked high in search results.
SEO companies and individuals began padding too many keywords that were not related to the site contents.
Header tags are also being over used and will become ignored (or are already being ignored) by search engines.
Almost any information you can read about how to optimize your site is most likely already being ignored by a modern search engine.
Code to strip html tags from text are old hat and were before World Wide Web was even a commonly used catch phrase. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) predates WWW.
Richinri please stop disrupting threads by repeating your manta of <h> tags. If you continue the alternative is to be banned from the forums.
I will be banned for wanting to assist more seasoned developers better use XWD and expand it's use in the marketplace? I will be banned for saying to people, "this feature isn't available now but may be in the future" instead of NO?
Every executive in Xara will get my posts in their hands within days of my banning. We will see if they think what I am doing is wrong.
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Re: [Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding
V12CATMAN - ok, but where is the link to the site ;) [or did I miss it?] - without that it is all just words and opinion
RICHINI - you too have not provided any proof, and frankly sound like a vested interest defending its pitch
I am willing to be convinced either way as I do not come with any preconceptions here, but lets have some actual case work and stats please..
not diatribe :rolleyes: