Animated gifs for navigational menu

[alacarte]

I have been asked to create a shopping cart with a menu using animated gifs. I have attempted to dissuade my clients from this for SEO reasons, but unless I come up with a very persuasive argument this is the road we are going down.

I have four questions:

1) I have seen that this forum strongly recommends text CSS menus over javascript menus. But what about using images as the menus as in the not too distant past?

2) Would using an animated gif effect SEO?
3) What about adding the javascript that it takes to create a rollover image if I want to add that?
4) The site is starting out small scale but is likely to expand soon. When subcategories are added (I haven’t figured out how I’d do that yet) will search engines be able to follow those links?

Thank you,

The Piper

[kayakbabe]

Re: Animated gifs for navigational menu

1. lots of people browse without javascript beucase of recent security scares, so if you have a 100% javascript based menu, then those people can't use it.

2. On your basket related navigation, things you would normally put a no follow in the link for anyway... thinks like "my account" "basket" "checkout" ... wouldn't hurt seo at all. You don't want those pages in the se indexes anyway...

BUT think about this.. for category navigation... which are really important to get listed in the indexes... and keeping in mind that it is known that google will give a little more credence to bulleted things, heading, list items, etc. than images with alt tags...
all that means you do want to use text for those.

3. you can do the rollover images with css, much more easily than with javascript. AND you don't have to worry about people not having javascript turned on. AND the css method degrades much more nicely. if css is turned off (or they are using a mobile phone to browse) the css degrades gracefully into text and is still usable. Using the css method you will not have to preload a javascript script, Thus, you won't have to have a javascript creating extra download and rendering time for the screen. Over all CSS is a much better way to go.

With css you can use a text link.. but have it display as an image and also have a roll over image. It can look just like those old fashioned javascript menus from the distant past (remember four years is archaic in web terms). And you can have all the advantages of the seo and control of a css based menu.

Also.. bonus.. if you ever want to change those menus.. one change in your css file will change that menu site wide everywhere. Anywhere that css tag is used. No having to dig though code. you only have to maintain it in one place.

Granted with miva storemoprh the way it is... it's not too hard. But let's say you want to have a wordpress blog or joomla as your non store pages... well the same css tag can control the appearance in both your store AND in non store pages of your site. Again.. better control and easier maintance.

fyi.. you can also via css define an image with a animated gif. You could have a default :link be a static image and the :hover state be ahimated if you want.

[alacarte]

Re: Animated gifs for navigational menu

Thank you very much for your reply.

So it sounds like I could have a vertical menu with animated .gifs for the categories that would have a rollover image to let the user know they're on the link.

At some point soon there will be subcategories. Can those pop out as text like is commonly used now? I can't imagine using images for that.

At the end you say "you could have a default :link be a static image and the :hover state be animated if you want." In my case I want to have an animated .gif appear initially and have that rollover as text as mentioned above. This sounds doable, right?

Alacarte

[Biffy]

Re: Animated gifs for navigational menu

You can do CSS rollovers with animated gifs and avoid javascript problems.