Rapid Site Development

You may remember me talking about the new Rapid Site 3 software that’s being  developed for Customerstreet by Stuart Laverick.

Well it’s getting pretty exciting now with the core functionality completed. Stuart has a long (but very interesting post) on how the software is shaping up here.

Over the next few weeks we will be adding even more functionality to the software, including built in SEO functions that will be hidden in the back end – so users will not have to worry about understanding how websites are optimised for search engines.  We’re also investigating the use of a “traffic light” system which will not allow pages to be published live until they meet a simple (but quite strict) criteria for seo.

All pages will be created using xhtml and css, so that when page styles are switched off the page  reads like a page of normal text with headings and paragraphs. This is known as semantic text and search engines love it.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Msn are really only interested in the text on a web page – it’s all they can read (apart from alternate text adding to images) so if we can give them this text in a clean logical format they will crawl the web page more efficiently.

I’ll keep you up to date on the seo improvements.