Pop Menu Magic and Me

I run a site called MusicAustin. I redid it a few months ago with a CSS layout and a menu system from Project Seven called Pop Menu Magic. It’s a great menu and I really like the features. Take a quick side trip over to MusicAustin to see how it works if you aren’t familiar with Pop Menu Magic.

My traffic and my search engine results fell almost immediately, as you can see from the Webalizer stats in the screen capture below.

Webalizer stats for MusicAustin

It took me a while to notice the drop in traffic and the lousy search engine placement; then it took me a while longer to figure out why. Once I fixed it (in August) you can see that my traffic bounced right back up near its former level.

My problem was that I had some of the top level menu items with nothing but <a href="#"> in the anchor element. The search engines weren’t finding anything to follow. I’d broken the path to the secondary level list and the pages they referenced. The solution was to make sure that every link in the top level list actually went to a page, even if it was one of the pages mentioned in the subnav that popped out on hover.

You know, I’ll bet the supporting documentation for Pop Menu Magic mentions this. So my aplogies to everyone at Project Seven (I love you guys) if all I had to do was RTFM. But I have to learn everything the hard way, and this is just one more proof of that sad fact.

2 thoughts on “Pop Menu Magic and Me”

  1. I didn’t see any active menus activity such as sub-menus, just the top level across the top or upper portion of your site……though I am sort of interested in the popmagic menu from projectseven…..I have not made the leap yet…..the menu I have works for now……..
    THanks
    Bruce

  2. Hi Bruce,
    This post refers to a web site that I no longer own. The Web Teacher blog doesn’t use it. I’ve used it on other sites, and can verify that it is easy to use and change. The menus work well as includes (server side includes or PHP includes) so it’s extra easy to maintain a menu system. Just be sure the top level links actually go to a page on the site and don’t use a fake link.

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