ibaker
Well-known member
I run a light aviation related web site and in aviation there are laws that can be very different in different countries. Also aviation is an industry where you have to be so very careful what your site contains as lives are at stake as well as those different laws. For example one specific aircraft has a maximum speed of 120 knots in the US yet that same aircraft doesn't have a speed limit imposed on it in other countries.
This all makes it very hard to have a global light aviation website unless you have ways to distinguish elements of it based on geographical region. My idea on how to achieve this, which I would like to bounce of the heads of others who use XF, is as follows.
Forum categories are constructed in a manner that allows for generic categories and geographic specific, or regional categories. Across the top of the forums there are buttons to select the different geographic regions i.e. "All" - "Aust" - "USA" - "UK" etc.
Each region has its own Style so clicking on a region changes the XF Style and that style not only has region specific header, images, advertising etc but also displays the generic categories of forums plus the selected region categories of forums.
The default forum display would have to be the "All" option which would use the default style...each region style hangs off the master default style. When a guest comes to the site they see the default "All" style and when a registered user logs in their last style used, presumably the style for their region along with that region's forums etc, is displayed for them.
Addons like a Photo Gallery, Video Library, Articles etc can be generic across all styles and other addons that are region specific can be coded in the templates to display just that style (region) content.
So is this, in general, a good approach or not?
There are some issues that I haven't worked out yet...what problems in your mind can you see with it?
Some issues I can see are addons may not be able to be broken up into regions...for example the calendar/events addon of XenAtendo...it only allows for one calendar so flying events for one region, that are of no interest to pilots in a different country, can not be isolated to a specific region/XF Style.
And now this is the big issue...all this is assuming a single domain. SEO on a single domain is ok as a guest user sees the default style i.e. the "All". But what if this was to be taken further to capitalise on regional SEO domains in terms of their tld. Is their a way that you could, for example, have domain.com as the main domain and then use say .us (for USA), .co.uk (for UK), .com.au (for Aust) etc, each one being a parked (or ???) domain off your main .com one. How could this be done, is it actually worth it, what about internal links, how to attach a style to a domain name, would Google and co pick up the tld's and give them a higher rating in each country etc etc etc?
Any ideas on how best to set all this up and capitalise on getting the absolute most out of an XF site?
Thanks for your comments and discussion!
This all makes it very hard to have a global light aviation website unless you have ways to distinguish elements of it based on geographical region. My idea on how to achieve this, which I would like to bounce of the heads of others who use XF, is as follows.
Forum categories are constructed in a manner that allows for generic categories and geographic specific, or regional categories. Across the top of the forums there are buttons to select the different geographic regions i.e. "All" - "Aust" - "USA" - "UK" etc.
Each region has its own Style so clicking on a region changes the XF Style and that style not only has region specific header, images, advertising etc but also displays the generic categories of forums plus the selected region categories of forums.
The default forum display would have to be the "All" option which would use the default style...each region style hangs off the master default style. When a guest comes to the site they see the default "All" style and when a registered user logs in their last style used, presumably the style for their region along with that region's forums etc, is displayed for them.
Addons like a Photo Gallery, Video Library, Articles etc can be generic across all styles and other addons that are region specific can be coded in the templates to display just that style (region) content.
So is this, in general, a good approach or not?
There are some issues that I haven't worked out yet...what problems in your mind can you see with it?
Some issues I can see are addons may not be able to be broken up into regions...for example the calendar/events addon of XenAtendo...it only allows for one calendar so flying events for one region, that are of no interest to pilots in a different country, can not be isolated to a specific region/XF Style.
And now this is the big issue...all this is assuming a single domain. SEO on a single domain is ok as a guest user sees the default style i.e. the "All". But what if this was to be taken further to capitalise on regional SEO domains in terms of their tld. Is their a way that you could, for example, have domain.com as the main domain and then use say .us (for USA), .co.uk (for UK), .com.au (for Aust) etc, each one being a parked (or ???) domain off your main .com one. How could this be done, is it actually worth it, what about internal links, how to attach a style to a domain name, would Google and co pick up the tld's and give them a higher rating in each country etc etc etc?
Any ideas on how best to set all this up and capitalise on getting the absolute most out of an XF site?
Thanks for your comments and discussion!
