Tuesday 03 August 2004 2:16:21 am

Hi!

It seems I'm back on this problem again... didnt manage to solve it last time, but found a work around - this time it seems I have to solve it :(

I'm suprised noone else has come across this - having a menu that expands to show the available sub-options without sending you to the clicked on page are common - but I guess normally use javascript.

To answer Alex's question, I'm not using javascript.

The problem is that the menu expands dependent on the nodeid of the page, but if you remove the link in the 1st level of the menu the nodeid doesnt change and so the menu doesnt expand.

So its a coding catch22.

Has anyone had to deal with a similar situation... to explain what I'm trying to do. I have a client who has 350 or so product catagories. They want a tree menu that expands, or some other form of sensible navigation. So you might choose:

Cheese >> Blue Cheeses >> Stilton

The problem is I dont want to be redirected to the index pages of 'Cheese' and 'Blue Cheese' as I expand the menu to get to 'Stilton' - its only when I click on 'Stilton' should there be any form of navigational direct.

Any thoughts or work arounds for this, especially ones that dont include java as they want the site to be as search engine friendly as possible.

Thanks, Steve.

http://www.oneworldmarket.co.uk

Tuesday 03 August 2004 9:25:19 am

Steve, one solution (less than ideal), would be to add a checkbox to the class used for your categories to toggle whether or not a link should be provided. You could then check the value of the checkbox in your code to decide whether or not you provide the link. So, in your case if Cheese and Blue Cheese were not checked, but Stilton is, your code would display the link for the Stilton page.

If there are a set number of levels, you could try detecting the current depth of the item being displayed in the menu and decide that any menu item greater than X deep would display the link. But that would require a rigid category structure which may not be realistic.

One thought in general, using JavaScript in this case shouldn't make the site any less friendly to search engines as they will merely ignore the JavaScript command to stop the load and visit the page, which conveniently will have a bunch of your keywords on it. In ranking the pages though, Google and its competitors are unlikely to offer the user these intermediary pages, as other pages on your site are likely to have the same keywords plus additional content. On our corporate site we make extensive use of menus which have links to category pages much like your own and haven't had any issues with page ranking.

Alex
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Alex
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