Submission Status: http://www.hillscapital.com/

Greetings. I posted a similar request back in March, but for some reason, the forum can't find the username or password I'd set up, so I had to start a new thread.

I'd like to request the status of:
http://www.hillscapital.com/

for directory:
http://www.dmoz.org/Business/Investing/Commodities,_Futures/Brokerages/

Last time (back in March), the moderator told me that it was in the queue and waiting, but slow load times under the Netscape browser made him give up on trying to load it (it was designed for IE 6 +). I've updated the .js code to DOM2 standards, so the site should load stably (albeit slowly) in NS, and looks almost identical to the site when loaded in IE.

If possible, I'd like to have the site revisited (if you can't access it with NS, I'd suggest either IE or Lynx, it's great in Lynx) and any suggestions given as to whether I'm doing anything else wrong that might keep it from getting indexed.

Thanks.

Re: Submission Status: http://www.hillscapital.com

Your site is awaiting review in this category, along with about 20 other sites.

FYI, browser incompatibility or design issues are not reasons to reject a site. However, if editors with non-Win/IE configs can't review a site they may just leave it for someone else, and in this case it might take much longer for a submission to be considered.

Re: Submission Status: http://www.hillscapital.com

Hi, all.

Just checking in on the submission status of our website, and to give a quick update.

A previous thread (I tried logging back in via that thread, but it had attributed it to a user named masad, not our user name, so I created this thread.) suggested that the site was too slow to load, and didn't work cross-browser, so I've been working hard on those two issues.

Well, I tried really hard to make the navigational DHTML javascript be DOM2 compatible, and work in all browsers, but Netscape just won't do it. No matter what I do, it reloads the entire page, instead of just changing the contents of the target DIV.

So, I contacted a programming guru, and we're working on a JSP solution. He's already mocked up a working proof-of-concept, so after ironing out some bugs with loading in .PDF files, the site should be completely cross-browser compatible.

I also removed the webcam applet from the front page to speed up load time, and cut down on the number of symbols the quotes ticker shows so it loads in more quickly, as well.

I haven't had the chance yet to test everything cross-browser, I'm saving that until after we get the JSP solution working in IE.

So, within a week or two, our site should be completely cross-browser compatible (I hope. [crossing fingers]).

Anyway, is there anything else I can do to the site to speed the submission process? If you want to look at our site right now, IE 5.5 or higher is the recommended browser.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Re: Submission Status: http://www.hillscapital.com

It's been six months since we've submitted the site. My boss is now riding me to figure out why we're not getting indexed into dmoz.org.

Can anyone tell me any factors that might be holding us back?

I've worked hard to get the site to load faster (it'll still load slow in NS, because NS has to take the time to start up its JRE, while IE starts its JVM when the browser is started). While the site will load into NS, there still remains the navigational problem with NS (it reloads the entire page when a link is clicked, instead of injecting the external HTML file into the target DIV), but it's being worked on.

The site is fully functional (and has been for quite some time before we submitted to dmoz.org) in our target browsers (Windows IE v5.5 or later) (we decided not to code for older browsers, as it's too much headache for so few users... the overwhelming majority (99.7%) of people surfing our website have the latest version of IE (they have to in order to properly do online trading, not just with us, but with any brokerage firm. Older browser don't support the technology necessary (and in most instances are far too unstable) to use for online trading).

Anyhow, if you can give me any pointers that will help out the editor to make it easier to index our site, I'd appreciate it.

Re: Submission Status: http://www.hillscapital.com

You should tell you boss that he would have to hire a magician to achieve a listing. We do not guarantee any timeframe, we just do our work (volunteer work, remember that).

The only problem that existed was, that an editor coming in with IE 5 on a Mac could not see anything but the ticker, but that weas already stated above. Since then simply no editor looked at the site-suggestion.