MyCatholicSource.com - 'Quick Help' Page: Visitor Wants Border Moved Back To Left Side Of Site

Answer / Resources:

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Thank you for your feedback concerning our new design. We agree with you from a usability standpoint that it would be preferable to keep the border on the left side. Unfortunately, however, we have been 'dinged' (so to speak) by the major search engines for our original design which placed the borders there at the left. The reason search engines have a problem with this layout is that they crawl html pages in a linear fashion, reading code from top to bottom (visually from top to bottom & left to right), and large blocks of code – e.g. our rather extensive borders – which appear at the top or to the left of page content push the content far down in the code. For example, with our original design (with borders at the left), the actual page content may not appear until after more than 36,000 characters of code appears for the top and left borders. With the new design, there are may be less than 8,000 characters of code before actual page content appears, because borders at the right are read AFTER the page content. So by shifting the borders to the right (again, these are read AFTER the page content by search engines), relevant content appears about 78% higher in the code, theoretically resulting in a much better ranking. That is the reason we have to make this change. Ultimately if we cannot get our site to appear in search results, we won't be able to stay online because we cannot afford to pay advertising fees for everyone who visits our site. We really do wish we didn't have to make this change, but it is necessary for us to do if we are going to have a chance to remain online. The good news is that I think you do tend to get used to this placement at right after a while. If not, we apologize for the inconvenience. Thanks again for contacting us. We really appreciate hearing your thoughts.

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