Webhelp not loading navigation frame

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Ingmar Koecher
Posts: 18
Joined: Wed Nov 11, 2009 11:13 pm

Webhelp not loading navigation frame

Unread post by Ingmar Koecher »

Another issue we have with our web help is that when people end up on one of our documentation pages, then the navigation frame on the left is not displayed. This doesn't seem to be an issue with the H&M official help. For example, if I directly navigate to https://www.helpandmanual.com/help/hm_w ... rmats.html, then the navigation frame on the left is loaded. This doesn't happen for us though.

I noticed earlier that the option "When a topic is loaded outside the navigation frame, force it to reload the navigation frame" was unchecked. However, even after checking and re-compiling, it's not loading the navigation frame.

What am I doing wrong?
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Tim Green
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Re: Webhelp not loading navigation frame

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Ingmar,
I noticed earlier that the option "When a topic is loaded outside the navigation frame, force it to reload the navigation frame" was unchecked. However, even after checking and re-compiling, it's not loading the navigation frame.
Don't use that option if you want your site to be tracked by Google. That's why it's off by default. It's an old setting, and we discovered a while ago that when it's active Google will stop indexing your site because Googlebot interprets the automatic reload with the full UI as a black hat SEO attempt to double your page views.

The reason for what you are seeing is that in the standard skins, you need to use the index.html?topic.htm syntax to open the full WebHelp UI. this is because the main page is index.html, and the topic file is loaded into an iFrame on that page, which stays open during the whole session. Browsing to a different topic replaces the current topic in the iFrame with that one. This is necessary to avoid having to reload everything (TOC, index, search page etc) every time you view a new topic.

When a user just visits topic.html without the automatic redirect active, then only the topic page is displayed. With the current skins, there should be a link displayed above the topic title that the user can click on to reload with the full UI.

So why doesn't the main Help+Manual help on our website have this problem? It uses a "frameless" skin from the Premium Pack add-on. In these skins, there is no main index.html page -- that is just a regular topic page like any other (it's the default topic), so the index.html syntax is not needed and you can just select any topic directly. When you browse to other topics with these skins, the topic is reloaded dynamically into the current page from a compressed copy that only contains the content and nothing else. This is extremely fast -- much faster than loading the full topic into an iFrame (50-300ms instead of 1-2 seconds).
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Ingmar Koecher
Posts: 18
Joined: Wed Nov 11, 2009 11:13 pm

Re: Webhelp not loading navigation frame

Unread post by Ingmar Koecher »

Thanks, we solved this problem by purchasing the premium pack.
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