We have been working on updating the website content in rapid weaver 7.2. In adding some of the lists we realised that there is no real function to intent or tab stop sublists lists within lists does not work. This brought us on to find the heading function, which has heading 1 to 6 < >. Having looked at this it seemed to format the headings as larger text and with some code. We have simply made the font larger. The question is do we now need to go back and use this function so that all the headings that we had made simply by enlarging the font as proper headings using the code? If so it is not a problem. Finally, how do we format the document to allow something similar to tab stops?
How do we create blogs is this part of Rapid Weaver 7.2 or is it a plug in?
Headings <h1> through <h6> have semantic importance. Search engines, screen readers, and robots use them extensively to determine the subject of a page.
So YES use headings not just larger text.
As for formatting things like tab stops and nested lists, HTML removes all extra spaces. Stuff like padding and margins are used to position elements on the page.
It sounds like you’re using styled text. I would recommend you start using MarkDown instead. It supports indenting, nested lists, and makes semantically correct HTML like headings easier.
Thanks that is very helpful. As I understand it from the video in Utube on Rapid Weaver, H1 and H2 are automatically set in Rapid Weaver. At is the site name and title. If this is correct should I then be using H3 to H6 as you have correctly pointed out the focus is on search engines, screen readers, robots?
You are right, I am using styled text, as I no one told me about Markdown and I am not a professional web designer (or programmer) and Rapid Weaver was sold as a product anyone could use. My focus was to get the content right so that site is in beta before sending to a professional designer.
So if Markdown is going to mean extensive re-writing this might be saved to later, the focus now would have to be on putting in headings as a quick resolution to search optimization before moving on to Markdown. Does that make sense time wise?
That depends on the theme you are using.
You can have more than one h2 on a page and actually you can have multiple h1’s, but most resources will tell it’s bad practice, and to only have one h1.
The main problem I find with styled text is it produces terrible semantic code (HTML). Proper paragraph breaking isn’t there. Line spacing is done by line breaks <br>. So to you it looks like a paragraph, but screen readers, and robots look at code, not looks. It’s also limited as you found out, with lists and spacing.
That’s very true. You can use styled text; it’s easy, looks okay to the human eye and will produce a website.
The big thing RapidWeaver will do is allow you to expand and gives you the ability to produce simple and complex sites. I
So are you are saying to be accessible to readers and search engines the site needs to be written completely from stylised text to HTML using Markdown or something like that? If so how, are there any easy ways?
Search engines will do there best to determine what a site is about. It’s a machine not a human interpretation. They don’t look at images, but read the alternative text for the image. They don’t look at the “style” of your fonts or size of the text. They will use html tags like h1 thru h6 to determine subject and importance to the page.
So will a site get accessed by search engines even with poorly written HTML, yes it will. Will it get indexed the way you want, probably not.
There is a page type called Blog, when you add a new page you will see it as an option. There are also Blog Stacks if you start using the Stacks plugin.
If you don’t want to purchase anything (although stacks would be a good choice) there is a built in plugin for markdown. For simple blogs the built in blog plugin will work.
It all depends on how much you want to spend, and how complex you are looking to make a site.
I would recommend you go slow, as it doesn’t take long to spend a good bit of money on addons.
Thanks for your help. I think in the immediate term the quickest workaround is going to use the H3 to H6 tags in the original stylised text website. This is because unless you tell me differently I would have to re-write all the content again (over 45 pages) using new markdown pages as these are different to Stylised text. However, re-drafting the landing page into markdown might be something I need to do.
It then seems that I need to redraft each page. In markdown.
I had a look at Stacks - again but I think that this would run up a lot of expense and it equally requires a lot of new learning. It seems that I would have to do more work than markdown as (1) I would need to learn how to use it (2) I would have to also redraft the site again.
I think your plan sounds like a good one. Stacks give you a lot of flexibility but come with a cost. Stacks also comes with a markdown stack, as well as a styled text stack, but again I tend to stay away from styled text for the same reason as the styled text plugin.
I would start with adding the proper h2 - h6 headings. Then you can as needed (for things like nested lists and indentation) convert a page at a time to markdown.