head section - WEBSALE Dokumentation

The <head> element is a mandatory element in all HTML standards and essentially contains information about the content of the HTML page. In WEBSALE V8s templates you can use all <head> elements that comply with the HTML standard. Certain <head> elements are also mandatory in WEBSALE V8s and must be included using specific WEBSALE tags. These elements are described on this page: meta information, the base element, character encoding, the canonical directive, and the WS-Config section.

Meta information

Meta information is a general term for data that contains information about other data. In HTML there is the meta element for this purpose. In the <head> section (and only there) it can be used to provide additional information that helps with parsing the file or managing its content. With WEBSALE V8s you can use any number of meta elements. For some meta elements, WEBSALE even provides dedicated WEBSALE tags. You can easily integrate meta information into every template. To do so, simply insert the desired meta tags inside the <head> section of your page.

Meta robots tag

The meta robots tag determines whether an HTML file should be discoverable by a search engine or not. This makes it one of the most important meta tags, and it should always be placed inside the <head> section of the template. With the WS-RobotControl tag, WEBSALE V8s automatically controls whether “index,follow” or “noindex,nofollow” is set.

<head>
   ...
   <meta name="robots" content="~WS-RobotControl~">
   ...
</head>

For more information, see the reference for WS-RobotControl and the guides “Robots information in the HTML head” and “Controlling search engines with robots.txt”.

Meta description and keywords tag

For the short description and the keywords, you can use WEBSALE tags on the product overview page (ws_category.htm) and the product detail page (ws_product.htm) that let you generate this information dynamically per category and/or product. Example for categories:

<head>
   ...
   <meta name="description" content="{CAT-Descr}~CAT-Descr_StripHtml~{/CAT-Descr}">
   <meta name="keywords" content="~CAT-Name_StripHtml~ {CAT-FreeField2}~CAT-FreeField2~{/CAT-FreeField2}">
   ...
</head>

Example for products:

<head>
   ...
   <meta name="description" content="{PR-Descr}~PR-Descr_StripHtml~{/PR-Descr}">
   <meta name="keywords" content="~PR-Name_StripHtml~">
   ...
</head>

For more information, see the guides “Description of a category” and “Configuring and activating TopRank”.

Base element

The base element defines the base for all relative references on your templates. The base directory of a WEBSALE online shop is always the subshop template directory. To always guarantee correct referencing to the base, the base element must always be specified with the URL-Template tag:

<head>
   ...
   <base href="~URL-Template~">
   ...
</head>

For more information, see the reference for URL-Template.

Character encoding

WEBSALE V8s is aware that using UTF-8 not only makes page creation easier, but also prevents unexpected results when submitting forms and when encoding URLs, where the document’s character encoding is also used as the basis. However, specifying UTF-8 as the encoding is not permitted for technical reasons: some third-party (systems) that may be connected in Germany and many other countries around the world do not yet fully support UTF-8. This can affect, for example, payment, credit checks, search service providers, ERP systems, or logistics providers. Please use a correct ISO character set instead. If the texts of the shop interface and the product data need to be localized for a specific country or language, only the ISO character set matching that language needs to be set for this shop. Since the sample shop provided by WEBSALE is delivered in German, the character encoding ISO-8859-1 is used as charset:

<head>
   ...
   <meta charset="ISO-8859-1">
   ...
</head>

For more information, see the guide “Setting language, character set, and date format”.

Canonical directive

The canonical tag is another step search engine operators have taken to get “duplicate content” under control. Duplicate content occurs when two or more pages with different URLs show the same or nearly the same content. This can have a negative impact on the search engine ranking of your online shop. Therefore, add the canonical directive with the WS-RobotCanonical tag to the <head> section of every template and adjust the tag’s output to avoid duplicate content:

<head>
   ...
   <link rel="canonical" href="~WS-RobotCanonical~">
   ...
</head>

For more information, see the guide “Canonical directive in the HTML head” and the reference for WS-RobotCanonical.

WS-Config: setting configuration parameters

In this section, various configuration parameters are passed that are to be used specifically for the template. The section is inserted as an HTML comment in the header of the template where the configuration parameters are to be valid:

<!--{WS-Config}
   ...
   PMPositionType = css_ul
   ...
{/WS-Config}-->

For more information, see the reference for WS-Config.

​Meta information

​Meta robots tag

​Meta description and keywords tag

​Base element

​Character encoding

​Canonical directive

​WS-Config: setting configuration parameters