Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

Our site analytics seem to be causing problems with the menu system that I was creating. They take as long as 90 seconds at times, but what really bugs me is that they have to complete before our menu will start working. Looks like I'm going to need to go back to the drawing board on this one... maybe I can modify the menus to not use JavaScript at all to fix this. I'm not totally sure what way I'll be going at this point. I like the way this one works now, but the performance with our analytics just stinks. If it's not one thing, it's a dozen others. Ugh.

So I've taken part in a debate over if CSS navigation systems cause an SEO penalty and all the internal pages to fall out of grace with Google. I personally don't think this is the case, so I've started working on one for ToolBarn.com. I can see how the usability for some will be great, for others it'll be used the same as always, and some people will keep on using search. However, it's neat looking and our competitors don't currently use it, so it'll differentiate us from them. So what's the reason people are saying it's a penalty? Simple. There are div's that are hidden. Well, the version I'm building doesn't use many divs. Most of it is just unordered lists with different classes applied depending on the depth. I'm interested to see how it ends up looking and working. My biggest obstacle right now is our webstats and our live help buttons. They both run JavaScripts that have to complete before the JavaScript for the nav system will...

I'm taking my time in sharing mini revelations (insights gleamed from reverse engineering our google mini's algorithm.) I've got so many tests planned and want to make sure that the data I'm extracting is accurate. Anyone with an interesting test, let me know. I've been playing around with link order. If I link to a series of pages as linkto1 linkto2 linkto3, does it change anything to reverse that like linkto3 linkto2 linkto1? I've tried playing with that a big, but it's tough to conclusively decide without making 100's of pages exactly the same and reversing the links. Then, I'm having to go back and forth to make sure the results are consistent. I'll be ready to share my observations on this one shortly. I'm all ears for new tests. Brian.