Skip to main content

Reserved page in Yahoo! Store

A client of mine asked me to figure out why her order status page - which contained only a simple HTML form - didn't work on her published site. It was a strange phenomenon, the page she created worked perfectly fine in the editor, but on the published site, all it showed was the word OK. This was really strange, as I couldn't see anything wrong with the HTML itself.

Then, I thought, since the form used an outside service to return order status, maybe that service did something to the page. So I took the form out (leaving that order status page basically blank, with only the store header, navigation, and footer on it) and republished. Same thing! Only OK on the published site... Then I looked at the source of that page, and in the source there was nothing else except for OK. Now that was really strange, because in Yahoo! Store you cannot even create a page that does not at least have a regular web page layout like this:

<html>
<head>
<title>No Name>/title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Since this page had none of that, I had a thought and plugged in the same URL but within another Yahoo! Store, my own: http://www.ytimes.info/status.html

Voila! Same result, that page only showed OK - but I didn't even have a status.html page... So I went back to my client's site, recreated the order status page as order-status.html, published, and all of a sudden everything worked great.

Out of curiosity, I tried a few other Yahoo! Stores to see if they also had a status.html page, and as I expected, they all did - and with the same OK and nothing else on it. So I contacted Yahoo! and confirmed:

status.html is a reserved page in every Yahoo! Store used for server monitoring.

So my first conclusion was: don't create a page whose ID (url) is status, it won't work on your published site.

But better yet, you can turn this into a useful feature: create a status.html page in your store, but use it for internal communication for your company. You can put notes there for your staff, instructions, etc. Whatever you put there will only be visible in the editor, not on the published site.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CPR for a Yahoo Store on Google's Supplemental Index

Recently a client of mine came to me and said that most of his store pages disappeared from Google, and he did not do anything to make this happen. I was a bit skeptical, so I went to Google, did a search on his store, and sure enough, there were only two pages indexed, his home page and his site map (ind.html) page. The rest were in the supplemental results, which means that Google thought the rest of the pages were not much different than these two pages. When I looked at the supplemental results, the little excerpts under each link were exactly the same, and I also noticed that what Google showed under each result was actually text from the ALT tags of the header image. I looked at some of these pages in my client's store, and they were actually different. This was a bit puzzling, but then I thought perhaps Google saw that the header and left navigation was the same throughout the site (which is pretty normal), but that the text that made each page different was too far down ins
Post a Comment
Read more

What to expect when your redesign goes live

At Y-Times we roll out new designs, redesigns and other major upgrades to Yahoo stores on a fairly regular basis. Some of the main questions our clients ask are how to prepare for a roll-out and what to expect in terms of SEO and conversions when the changes go live? For any functional Yahoo store how well the site ranks and how well it converts are probably the two most important metrics. Since pretty much ANY change you make to any page can potentially alter either or both of these metrics, merchants may understandably feel nervous about far reaching alterations to their sites. However, when those functionality and design changes and additions are done right, there is really very little to fear. First off, what does it mean for a design or redesign to be "done right?" From the technical stand point, search engines look at the underlying structure of your site (the HTML, and increasingly also the CSS and JavaScript code) to try to extract information and meaning from i
Post a Comment
Read more

Smaller is Better

You often hear the phrase "bigger is better". Sometimes it's true but not when it comes to JavaScript or CSS code in your Yahoo! Store pages. If you include JavaScript code or CSS either as linked files (the preferred method) or embedded inside your pages (obviously not preferred), making these files as small as possible should be your goal. Why? This is no rocket science: smaller files mean faster page loads = happy customers. Ok, so what bloats JavaScript code? In general, white space (tabs, carriage returns, non-used spaces), comments, and the actual code, such as variable and function names. You have control over all of these, however, if you don't use white spaces, carriage returns or comments, it will be immensely difficult to understand and modify your code. And not just for others, you too. There are many commercial JavaScript compression tools around, but I've been using this handy and free utility: http://www.andrewkesper.com/jscrush/ This little utilit
1 comment
Read more