Starting an E-Magazine.. advise please

Tea_J

Hey guys, im starting an e-magazine for our adventure sports shop.. I was hoping i'd get advises, tips and head's up before i start pushing buttons...

The features of my e-mag will be:

Monthly archiving
Viewer remarks at the bottom
Articles list are categorized (kayaking, scuba diving, etc)
Articles will have banner advertisements
Articles will have hyperlinks

Basic display of article will be:

Header: Title, subtitle/quote, date

Footer: soure/writer/remarks

Body: Justified format, one picture per article with an optional gallery /thumbnails at the bottom or sides.

The updating process:
Writters will:
1) Login
2) Choose a category
3) Choose a template
4) Fill in the blanks and save
5) Upload pictures
6) Editor will approve/edit/deny articles before posting

So far this is what i had in mind. I was hoping you guys can give me some advise, you know, tell me what to watch out for and stuff..

Another thing is, i wana put the data in the database. But i just remembered, HOW WILL THE SEARCH ENGINES CRAWL FOR THE ARTICLES? Coz sometimes when i search on google, google finds my query in articles from different newspaper sites and etc. and I want our site to be like that.. when you search for scuba, you'll find our articles about scuba.. but if i store the data in a database, wouldnt that blind the search engines?

Really desperate for advises here people..

Tea

planetsim

You'd need it accessible from some form from on your website. Maybe have an articles page where users can login if they dont wish to recieve it by mail and rather view it on your site. But to get the Bots to crawl you'll need some sort of way to identify who is a legitimate user and what is a bot and what Bots to allow.

Its not difficuilt but its cumbersome

Elizabeth

tea it's my understanding that Google will see your dynamically created web pages, so that if you are pulling the information from a database then it will be included in the Google search result.

I've seen this in the google board, that if you are having a problem with google not indexing your site correctly, you might check to see if you are using URLs with parameters named "id" because they look like session IDs that change from one visit to the next, and google will avoid indexing those.

Tea_J

@
Great info there ma'am! thanks!
So are you suggesting I dont use "ID" or similar forms?

like:
mysite.com/articale.php?id=12412 //bad
mysite.com/articale.php?art=12412 //good
is the above correct?

Also, in regard to google searching in databases, can someone confirm this? Coz I wana be sure that my articles are indexed before I start coding to a database.

Hmm.. it's amazing.. how can search engines pull data from databases? I thougth they crawl real physical html pages only? 🙂

Thanks so far.

Tea

Elizabeth

Tea,
I believe you have it correct... can't confirm that using "id" actually does create a problem- I have just read about that in the google forum.

As far as google indexing dynamic pages, this is from their fact/fiction section of their site:

Fiction: Sites are not included in Google's index if they use ASP (or some other non-html file-type.)
Fact: At Google, we are able to index most types of pages and files with very few exceptions. File types we are able to index include: pdf, asp, jsp, hdml, shtml, xml, cfm, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri.

I can also confirm that php is included in the above files - our ecommerce site is completely indexed even though everything is in a database.

Not sure about the specifics of how it works, but I know it does 🙂

vaska

yes, but...it's completely random...lord knows how google actually decides what url to put in it's database...

if you want google to index, why don't you create a single page that has all of your posts conveniently in one location for google to index...and also change the little things like titles...

MyBlog - Day One
MyBlog - The second day

and perhaps even dynamically set the meta tags...but metatags are basically a thing of the past...you could go the "semantic web" route too...

http://ftrain.com/ContraShirky.html

the more unique, while still staying within googles rules will get you more indexing...

good luck...v

piersk

[to be read with tongue firmly embedded in cheek]TBH, I suggest you do it all in MS Publisher and then use its "export to html" function and just upload that.[/what I said earlier]

Tea_J

awsome feedback guys... so what else can ya'll suggest before i start developing my e-mag?