About a year ago I purchased the whole shebang of Coffee Cup products and have been using the VSD for a while now. I have used Frontpage in the past. I am currently redesigning one of my websites using VSD, you can check it out at the link below.

My question is...since I plan to continue building my hobby (hopefully someday more than a hobby) websites should I be taking the time to learn and use the HTML editor instead? If so, would it be recommended to bring what I have already created into HTML editor or start fresh? Any other constructive critisism is welcome as well...I can take it. Thanks for any advice.

http://www.creative-candy.com

Mark

The VSD editor is a very good start to get the right distribution on static pages (IMHO, much, much better than Frontpage), however, for a dynamic site like the one you show, which surely includes a database backend, you will most definitely need to write some code. You may want to start with some php and go from there.

Rafael

Mark,

VSD is great for developing sites quickly and with little HTML knowledge necessary, but to build sites as more than a hobby (using your words), HTML knowledge is a necessity...but do not fear, there are many, many good books, including CoffeeCup's "My Website Is Better Than Yours". And if you are a visual person, IDG Books have some good visual HTML books (mine is dog-eared and taped).

Melanie

Hi Mark,

I really like the site you built there, very nice. My problem is this: that site looks great to me and I cant see the difference in building that with VSD compared to building it with teh HTML editor?

Now, my goal is to build websites for small and new businesses and if I was a small business starting out (which i am I guess:)) I would be perfectly happy with a website as developed by you using VSD. So, why is it going to be an issue if you develop sites using VSD instead of the HTML editor? No doubt my inexperience is showing through but I am aware that there is a lot of code created by VSD compared to HTML editor, but why is this such a problem? and is there no way to clear out unneeded code using HTML editor afterwards?

Any advice and clarification is appreciated guys but please be gentle

Thanks,

Hi Stallen,

I'm not sure how much of this is attributable to VSD and how much is due to how it is used, but take a look at the VSD site using the Lynx text browser and you will see that it's not very accessible which is very important for professional websites.

Several of the links are lacking any text describing where they go, and it's impossible to select any of the products. This is indicative of the information a screen reader would be able to give a blind user.

There's also the matter of site maintenance. Depending on the wysiwyg, the code can be difficult to decipher and modify for someone who doesn't have the same editor and source files. Whereas, if the CC HTML Editor were used to produce the markup clean and semantically, any coder could come along with his text editor of choice and easily make any changes necessary.

Hi Cary,

Thanks for the reply. Damn, that means that really the best site builder to use really is the HTML editor. Ah well, I guess I'll just have to put the effort in eh? lol.

I was thinking, if there was a way to clone the site built in VSD and remove the graphics, colours, everything that makes it pretty and just have the text needed for it to appear one hundred percent okay in the Lynx text browser, then have that page appear for the search engines (basically as a cloak) but then use the text to build your site using VSD you could have the best of both worlds and it would still basically remain white hat SEO, yes?

All I would need to do is to learn how to build the site with just text on the pages and to have it as the cloak. But maybe that would take even longer than just learning to use the HTML editor?


What do people think?

A site developed in VSD - if taking advantage of alt-tags, etc, would still have the same SEO read-out as a page developed with HTML editor and raw code...but as stated earlier, the code generated by VSD and most visual editors is hard to edit outside of that environment.

And a "cloak" site as you suggest, could actually be viewed as "spam" by the search engine 'bots. When writing descriptions for items on my e-commerce sites, I will even change the description from the company's catalog because many other sites will stick with the description supplied, and there is a risk of that being viewed/ranked poorly by search engine spiders. If your text is not hidden within flash or iframes, the spiders can find it. And using alt tags (and I sometimes combine with title tags, changing each slightly -- ie alt="Flashy Zebra Print Purse by The Purse People" title="The Purse People Exclusive Flashy Zebra Print Purse available at MySite.com") adds extra "Search Engine Food".

Learning HTML is still probably the best bet - especially if you intend to offer a service for sale that is more than what a person could get from going to a self-service site like those springing up on many domain registrar sites.

Melanie,

I always use both alt and title tags. The alt tags for screen readers (and IE) and the title tags for those browsers that use those tags properly.

I duplicate the same information in the alt and title tags. Is that a no-no for SEO?

Bill,

I am not an SEO authority, but I read, read, read...and it seems I read that they should be "mixed about" a bit. Besides that's just one more opportunity for "feeding the 'bots"

Melanie

Melanie,

Since I currently have hundreds of images with duplicated alt and title tags, I may not be changing those, but in the future, I will try to remember to change them a little.

Learn a little every day.