Carpal Tunnel is definitely gonna catch up to me sooner or later after long sessions like today’s….

Ok, so I was looking over some posts on PAP when something reminded me of a navigation feature I’d been meaning to install. I know a lot of sites use breadcrumb navigation, and I wanted to try it out on my site (Pokersite.org) as well. Breadcrumb navigation is when you have the folder hierarchy listed at the top of each sub page, so if you had a page such as pokersite.org/strategy/online/players/ the path at the top of the page would look like Poker Site > Poker Strategy > Online Strategy > Player Strategy, with each keyword linking back to its respective directory.

This is great for your users, as they can quickly get back to the next level up in your site to find related articles. Also, it helps Google understand the organization of your site, and fully index your sub pages.

Ok, so I decide I want to implement this, and start searching for some scripts to do it automatically. I find this script at WebReference.com, and go to work installing it. After about an hour of importing the JavaScript file, adding it to my pages, and customizing it, I finally get it (semi) working.

Each page was displaying the breadcrumbs, but they were displaying as Poker Site > poker-strategy > online-strategy> etc etc. This obviously wasn’t what I was looking for, so I play around with the code for an hour or two to try to get the keywords seperated/capitalised. All of this lead to nowhere except me getting livid and swearing at my computer.

Finally, JohnH starts chatting w/ me on Skype and I ask him if he has any suggestions. He asks why I’m using JavaScript, because it doesn’t even display the links in the source, so obviously Google can’t read them. I hadn’t even though of this lol, and now I’m really getting steamed because all of that work on the JavaScript solution was for nothing.

Eventually, I went back and added the navigation to each page manually (what a process that was…. 200 some pages). Everything is live now, and works properly, so check it out and let me know your thoughts, and if any of you use breadcrumb navigation too!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.