Articles by Pople Web Design
The Good, The Bad, And FLASH

Flash has its place on a website, but it is only a part of a whole not the whole thing.

Adobe Flash is a program that can be used to create beautiful video based elements of a website, Pople Web Design use it allot in many of our sites to give it a fresh lively feel.

One of the great things about Flash is that it is well recognized by the web surfing world, and therefore can be viewed by the majority of visitors to a website but crucially not all visitors.

Making a website only in flash is common place, but is rather masochistic when it comes to usability, delivery of information, SEO, Download time, update ability ... the list goes on...

Search Engine Friendly?

An all flash website is disastrous for SEO, because the site is in one file (an swf) witch Google and any other search engines cannot read. Meaning that google cannot index your site and ascertain if the content of your site is what its customers (the public, your customers) are searching for. The search engines will rank a flash site badly unless lots of work is put into meta tags and other behind the scenes content. However even after doing this work which more often than not is not done. It will still never be possible to reach the same visibility as a dynamic site running a good CMS because a flash site is so static. On the other hand a good CMS will do all of the hard work for you in terms of SEF Urls and easily indexed content, it can easily produce a dynamic site map at a click of a button that will allow google to find all the information on your website and make it available to your potential customers.

Usability,

Another sticking point of an all Flash website, one clear problem is that the back button does not work as you would expect, if you reach a website from a search engine navigate to another page on that site and then click the back button on your browser you are sent back to your search engine, or worse it doesn't work at all, which is annoying but no big deal as long as the site is easy to navigate so you can find what you wanted to return to, but you cant search inside a Flash site either, so if the site has more than a couple of pages and you want to know something specific, like the start date of the course your interested in or the cost of a weeks holiday in Brazil, you are left having to sift through the whole site to find it which is a waste of time as you can probably find the same else where.

Size and Download time,

Flash can be made to be fairly small but loses its quality when reduced in size and more often than not its left at over a mega byte, this results in the need for a preloaded or worse just a really long load time with no feedback that the site will ever arrive. If your doing a site with flash it needs to be less than 100kb maximum to load within a reasonable time.  Total page size less than 30K is ideal, and should achieve sub eight second response times on 56K connections. Pages over 100K exceed most attention thresholds at 56Kbps, even with feedback. And since the many web users of the world are still using 56k including my neighbour. I belive that this is still a very valid value. I'm not saying every site has to be the anorexic google, but a nice slim yahoo is definitely the way web developers should still be leaning.

All in all Flash is great, As long as it is used as just a part of a site,

But only for the moving elements of a site and even then it should be kept as a solution amongst the others. With every attempt made to streamline the end product.
 
What is SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization,

It is the umbrella term used for improving your websites visibility in search engines. And at present it is the big internet thing that everyone is going on about because it brings in the visitors, good SEO can improve your websites page rank which will push it up the list of results in search engines making it easier to find and more visible to more people, which simply translates to more visitors to your website and hopefully more customers.

'Content is King'

Is a phrase which is always used when talking about SEO and improving your sites search results, it relates to the more content you have the better your page rank will be. This is because the big players in the search engine business are all about providing good interesting information to their customers (you and I who search for things). So a large part of your search results is about the text you have on your site, therefore you can do allot of the SEO yourself that the SEO company's are offering for £4k.

I have often seen beautifully designed websites on the internet that simply have no content that google can read, rendering them very difficult to find using conventional methods, this kills the websites productivity and I imagine in some markets would deeply damage the business.

We build SEO into our websites, by making them easy for search engines to navigate and understand, we always work the websites we produce into the major search engines, which ensures that you can be found by your prospective customers simply by typing your business’s name into the search engine of their choice.

When writing about your business don’t forget to include some key information; like where you are based and what you do. it should be informative and interesting, ensuring that people want to read it and get the information they are looking for from it.

If you are in a particular trade then start writing about it, write a paragraph each day for a week and you will have a healthy size article. The more your website is updated the better it will do in the search results race.

 
 
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