Dynamic Web Sites
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The next seminar I went to was the “Dynamic Web Sites” seminar moderated by Julian Smith (Jupiter research) speakers Jake Baillie (Priva), Mikkel deMib Svendson (Marketleap) and Laura Thieme (Bizresearch)

I was at the same seminar in Munich where Mikkel was also a speaker. He impressed me then and did again today. His suit was even louder than the one he wore at the German conference (bright orange), but it didn’t distract from the quality of his presentation. The inherent problems of dynamic websites were very well pointed out by all speakers with the biggest sinners predictably and correctly being pointed out as the seo's nightmare… CMS systems (content management systems). I know from experience of optimizing many a CMS website what a nightmare they are. Often there is no provision for even the basic of search engine optimization and virtually all of them need supplementary programming to be made to produce search engine friendly web pages. The first company to make a truly search engine friendly CMS system that is flexible and doesn’t require a team of programmers to modify it is going to make a killing. If there are any out there they are doing a poor job promoting it as none of the panel knew of any decent ones either.

Next on the sinners has to be the online shop systems/software. Intershop urls run the full length of your browser address bar and have more parameters/query strings than you can shake a stick at. An example of a url was shown on a slide and it practically filled the whole slide. The cost of purchasing an Intershop product would make even blue chip companies think twice, yet Intershop sites are nigh on impossible to make search engine friendly. Imagine paying literally tens of thousands of dollars for an online shop system and finding out a month later you have zero chance of getting any of your shop product pages indexed in ANY search engine. Others are just as bad, I’ve singled out Intershop as being probably the worst of them all as far as SEO is concerned, but there seems to be very little thinking going on at online shop software houses with regards to making their products search engine friendly.

Anyway, the basics were well covered in the seminar. Mod_rewrite/isapi filters on the urls, session id killing, template optimizing, creating static pages from dynamic content were all covered. Not in great detail it has to be said but the audience were for the most part decision makers and marketing types with less technical backgrounds. Going into mod_rewrite code and examples of session id killing / php url rewriting would not have been appropriate. What was important is that these decision makers could go back to their technical teams armed with the knowledge of the problems of cms systems/shop software and instruct their technical/webterams to do something about it. What I was particularly pleased to see was that references to some useful tools for creating static pages from dynamic content were provided.

Many speakers do not readily provide links to other resources and tools, I’m pleased Mikkel and the other speakers gave reference to such useful tools and software such as Kapow, robotmanager, Qwerksoft and others. A couple of others I would have added would be http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html which would give a techie a good starting point. Or for those not so technically minded or experienced on apache the webmaster toolkit mod_rewrite generator.
 

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