Ok it seems like people are going a little off topic here. The topic at hand was "New Web Site Design". Primarily this topic should be discussed in a manner where people say they either like it or not. What features they think are good and which ones are not. Are things presented in the correct fashion on the website. Is anything mis-informing. What do you like about the website. Stuff such as this are the things that relate to this topic.
Discussing things such as SEF Urls and such are off topic. These are thigns that should be discussed under "New feature requests" or something equivilant. I mean you wouldn't go to a parent / teacher conference and talk about alcohol addiction would you? LOL
I think that the new website is better. Alot cleaner and great use of usability vs accesssability. I think some things could be changed though. This comment has to do partly with the website and partly with the software. It says on the website that there are 20+ Gateways. Misinforming people is just simply bad ethics. Not something that any website owner should do. The features listed should always be the features that are already implemented into the software. I have commented on this before in another area of this forum, but I thought it was worth mentioning both for the software and for the "website".
If certain payment gateways are still under development, all but 6 of them, then essentially 14+ of them still remain at a "non-ready" status, which means that the software does not have 20+ Payment Gateways, it has 6. Please for the sake of the website give more correct and accurate information.
As long as I am here and people are discussing things off-topic and since the topic seems to have evolved from "new website design" to "sef urls" I guess I could go ahead and give my two cents... Search Engine Friendly URLs have been deemed useful and are becoming a requirement for the new Web 3.0 standard that are being set by the W3C and other website design/ development organizations. There are alot of well known names in the industry that promote sef urls and for very good reason.
When you have urls such as; "
http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?page=whatever" search engine crawlers index the content of pages with hardly any effort, but the links themselves do have issues as far as being indexed. Search Engine Indexing Algorythms do infact account for link structure. The arguement is that having a link such as the above mentioned versus something more like: "
http://www.yourdomain.com/page/whatever" has no real weight, because the search engine can still follow the links and index the pages, has no real significance. This is just simply not true. I know quite a bit about "Online Marketing" and the fact does remain that link structure does help quite a bit. First of all, so many companies would not be implementing it if it did nothing for page ranking and seo optimization. I have built quite a few websites and re-designed websites wih hardly any changes except for sef url structure and the ranking and indexing turned out to be much better. You just simply have to be smart about how you carry out your mod rewrites.
You are right, Magento uses a sef structure where you have a link such as this: "
http://www.yourstore.com/category1/prod ... tname.html", this is incorrect use of sef rewrites, because mostly the depth of directory and more importantly insugnificant data. category and product have nothing to do with the actual displayed content on your pages. In this case only the productname.html is consistant with the content of the page. Search Engines want to see things in links that are consistant with the data being displayed. For instance you wouldnt have a page talking about "toy trucks" and name the link cantsanddogs.html. That is just a huge waiste of a good link structure, but the same goes for using a link such as "index.php?page_id=14" when the page displays "toy trucks" as well. It's the same logic. SEO Logic says that the page title, page description, page keywords, the link to the page, and the content on the page (headings, paragraphs, etc) should all have one bases subject matter, so in the event you had a page with "toy trucks" you would use those words in the link, the title, description, keywords, and as much as you possibly can within the headings and paragraphs on the page without overdoing it.
Magento's use of /category1/product1/, this is something that also ruins the entire purpose, because neither directory name has anything to do with the content on your site. The optimal url structure would be something like; "
http://www.yourstore.com/toys/toytrucks" and having a suffix at the end such as; .php, .html, .aspx are not neccesary. They can be stripped away in the mod_rewrite. You don't just rewrite for one structure though. Let's say your site sells the following: toys, electronics, and furniture. The following url structure would be considered when implementing the mod_rewrite:
Toys - "
http://www.yourstore.com/toys/productname"
Electronics - "
http://www.yourstore.com/electronics/productname"
Furniture - "
http://www.yourstore.com/furniture/productname"
This structure can be done in the backend of Magento, it can be customized as it can be customized in Wordpress, Drupal, etc.... All you have to do is change the name of your categories and change the mod_rewrite accordingly. Anyone who argues that SEF Urls are not beinificial, may have spent the last 12 years developing, but they don't know jack about modern web design/ development.
