When I first designed and developed this website I did a lot, and I mean A LOT, of forward thinking about what kinds of information I was going to present and how I was going to present it. From day one, I understood that Karl Ribas.com would be a fairly large website, especially when considering the main site, this Blog, and a link directory all under the same roof. I knew that if this website was to have a chance at being successful I was going to have to implement an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand navigation scheme.

At the time, and against all basic SEO knowledge, I chose to incorporate a JavaScript-based drop-down navigation system. The major drawback with using JavaScript, at least by SEO standards, is that search engine spiders aren't able to read the code. If a spider can't crawl or read a website's links, it certainly can't locate or index other pages within the website... leaving a piss-poor SEO effort.

Having understood this, I still chose to work with JavaScript because it provided me with better options for organizing my site's pages. I also figured that a good navigation scheme trumped all marketing efforts... at least at that point in time. And besides, I knew a few work-a-rounds that could easily be implemented to solve most of these crawling / indexing issues.

This past Wednesday, my friend and Colleague Kelly Wilson introduced me to an alternative drop-down navigation scheme, only her solution was created with a combination of HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The solution was basically an HTML system that uses CSS to tie-in the mechanical portions of the drop-down, as well as many of the visual elements used in the scheme. An obvious difference between the two is that the URLs, those once buried in unreadable JavaScript, would now be displayed in standard HTML... and therefore could be crawled, read, and indexed by search engines.

It didn't take me too long to weigh-in the pros and cons of either sticking with my current solution or switching over to Kelly's option, and before I knew it I was eyes-deep into code. I spent 6 hours researching, coding, and tweaking the bare-bones system that was provided and when I finished I had on my screen an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand, visually pleasing, and search engine friendly navigation scheme that I was very proud of. In fact, it looked very similar to the one I was replacing. I spent an additional 2 hours optimizing the code for the FireFox browser, and then decided to make the switch.

What do you think? Did you notice the difference?

Before making the switch yesterday, I happened to be doing very well in the search engines for my select keyword phrases, and even maintained an average PageRank of 4 on the main pages and 3 on secondary pages. It's going to be very interesting to see how making this one change will improve on both of these areas.

What's going on with your navigation scheme? Are you using JavaScript or other "unfriendly" code in your navigation? Can search engine spiders crawl and locate your website's most important pages?