Nor List Page Size Issue

Search engine friendly UL list type menu for Actinic V8 and V9. Styled by CSS and animated by a small JavaScript.
Post Reply
leej
Posts: 46
Joined: Thu May 17, 2007 10:03 am
Location: Otley, Leeds
Contact:

Nor List Page Size Issue

Post by leej »

Hi Norman,
I have a client , who we have just built a site for a couple of weeks ago. He has come back to us after inputting his products and is finding difficulty in uploading his site.

http://www.enjoymuzic.com

Please note that to upload the latest site we have had to hide 3 top levle sections so PLAY will be the only one visible.

I have looked at the site and think that it is due to 4 levels of links that he has allowed the norlist depth drill down to. This was causing each page to become approx 450k and with 3000 pages the software could not cope with it. Unfortunately the client will only limit the depth to 3 and the user will have to navigation via 1 section link within the page itself.

Am I right in thinking that as you increase the depth of the level all then new links will be embedded into the pages, thus increasing the file size?

I would appreciate any suggestions how this could be possibly fixed.


Thanks for your time.
Lee
norman
Site Admin
Posts: 1252
Joined: Sat Feb 07, 2004 9:55 pm

Post by norman »

I see another menu similar to NorList on http://www.enjoymuzic.com. It is taking up 300Kb per page at present.

The size of any such menu will be dependent on the number of items in it. If you have thousands of pages then you'll need thousands of entries and at (say) 70 bytes per entry you'll end up with a huge amount of HTML on the page.

Possible solutions are to replace NorList with NorCascade. This uses the Actinic generated JavaScript section tree structures. They'll still be pretty big but will only need to load once per visit as they'll be in the browsers cache from then on. There's only a timy bit of code on each page instead of all the UL HTML. Search engines won't be able to follow these JS links so you'll need a Site Map or somesuch to help them.

If you put

Code: Select all

<actinic:variable name="JavaScriptArray" value="Name Data From All Sections" />
<actinic:variable name="JavaScriptArray" value="URL Data From All Sections" />
just above the </head> statemet in your Overall Layout, then Actinic will generate these files (act_section_tree_names.js and act_section_tree_URLs.js) and you can see how big they are.

If they are too big it may require some custom coding to help further.
Norman
leej
Posts: 46
Joined: Thu May 17, 2007 10:03 am
Location: Otley, Leeds
Contact:

Post by leej »

Thnaks Norman, for the suggestion regarding this matter. I will look into it further.
enjoymuzic
Posts: 8
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2008 6:39 pm

Re: Nor List Page Size Issue

Post by enjoymuzic »

Hi,

The http://www.enjoymuzic.com website mentioned above is ours and we've been using the norlist menu for around 6 months. We're really quite happy with the way it looks and performs but still have concerns about the pagesize generated (especially since we have nearly 3,000 pages which include this code). Can anyone think of a similar alternative or a way to change the code to make the page sizes smaller. we've tried to reduce the number of sections but with the type of shop we have it's damn near impossible.

We also have another issues which appears to be that the search engines are picking up some strange keywords from our site such as "musicj" and many more similar with multiple words truncated. Does anyone know if this could be anything to do with the norlist code as I can't imagine where else these keyphrases as coming from?

Thanks for any help.


David
http://www.enjoymuzic.com
norman
Site Admin
Posts: 1252
Joined: Sat Feb 07, 2004 9:55 pm

Re: Nor List Page Size Issue

Post by norman »

The site http://www.enjoymuzic.com isn't using NorList. I see some other menu on these pages that's not from me.

I also can't see the text "musicj" on the pages I looked at so I can't see how these could be indexed.
enjoymuzic
Posts: 8
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2008 6:39 pm

Re: Nor List Page Size Issue

Post by enjoymuzic »

norman wrote:The site http://www.enjoymuzic.com isn't using NorList. I see some other menu on these pages that's not from me.

I also can't see the text "musicj" on the pages I looked at so I can't see how these could be indexed.
Hi,

I'm definitely using a customised version of Norlist as we have settings such as norlistdepth within actinic. I think it was customised by Lee from Future Media using a css for colours etc.

I will try to find the utility I was using that extracted the truncated keyphrases and get a couple of examples to post on this forum. musicj was from memory and may not be exact.

David
norman
Site Admin
Posts: 1252
Joined: Sat Feb 07, 2004 9:55 pm

Re: Nor List Page Size Issue

Post by norman »

I'm definitely using a customised version of Norlist as we have settings such as norlistdepth within actinic
NorList isn't on your pages and it isn't NorList that displaying the left hand menu.
That menu appears to be something called ExpandingMenu and that code definitely isn't mine.

The variables may be left over from experimenting with NorList and then removing it.
Norman
enjoymuzic
Posts: 8
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2008 6:39 pm

Re: Nor List Page Size Issue

Post by enjoymuzic »

Thanks Norman, I'll look into this.

Aside from which menu I'm currently using are there any suggestions for an alternative with similar functionality but with less on-page code and suitable for SEO purposes?

Thanks

David
norman
Site Admin
Posts: 1252
Joined: Sat Feb 07, 2004 9:55 pm

Re: Nor List Page Size Issue

Post by norman »

You're in a difficult situation. If you have 3,000 pages and want them all to be accessible from every page you're going to need 3000 x (page name text + page URL + some HTML). Lets say that's 80 bytes per item - 3000 x 80 is roughly 240Kb of menu on every page. A LOT of code to load and generate but search engine friendly.

You could use a JavaScript based menu (like NorCascade). You lose the search engine friendlyness but the JS file only loads once on the visitors first view and is cached by the browser for all subsequent pages. With huige menus there may be a delay before it all appears due to the browser mprocessing that's needed.

You could use an AJAX system whereby the menu only loads the elements the customer mouse-overs in real-time. Not search engine friendly, possibly sluggish, and I've not written (and don't know of any) that interface with Actinic.
Norman
Post Reply