FLASH WEBSITE

[milavidal]

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[TPF Sponsor]

[JimmyO]

The only flash website i know of is Strobist, they've got all the info on flashes you will ever need

[TheProdigy]

You could look at something like this....

http://www.bludomain.com/

That site will sell you the website and then provide you with the ability to customize it to meet your needs.

There are a lot of sites out there where you can buy a flash template, but you would have to have Macromedia Flash or to edit the template to make it specific to you.

[Alpha]

Flashed-based sites are bad for business. Search engines can't read them, which means nobody will find your site via search.

[TheProdigy]

Search engines can find your page if you index page is html and then you have an Enter Site link as most flash sites do.

[milavidal]

Thank You guys! All that info is really useful !

Anything else I should know?

[Alpha]

Search engines can find your page if you index page is html and then you have an Enter Site link as most flash sites do.

You're missing the point. Any flash site is going to be built inside a minimalist html shell and will therefore be indexed by the search engines. The problem lies in the fact that they can't read any of the content and therefore have no idea what's actually on the site.

[Allsmiles7282]

I have a bludomain site and LOVE it. The only down side is that every photog out there uses them, so a lot of people have the same site as me. But for what you pay....its more than worth it.

[NJMAN]

The search engines can read your site content just fine if you build your index.html file properly. The search engines look at things like relevant keywords in your meta tags and in text descriptions on that page. Many photographers use their index pages as a gateway to separate things like a blog, and different versions of your website for dialup viewers versus high speed viewers.

The most important key to having your website seen frequently by the search engines is to refresh the page (slightly change the content) and upload it to your host on a somewhat regular basis. The search engines will see that the date has changed on the file, and it will re-index (if I stated that correctly ).

This, however, doesn't really matter to me because I don't care if anyone on the internet can google my website or not. I personally refer people to my website by giving them the address.

[Alpha]

The search engines can read your site content just fine if you build your index.html file properly. The search engines look at things like relevant keywords in your meta tags and in text descriptions on that page. Many photographers use their index pages as a gateway to separate things like a blog, and different versions of your website for dialup viewers versus high speed viewers.

The most important key to having your website seen frequently by the search engines is to refresh the page (slightly change the content) and upload it to your host on a somewhat regular basis. The search engines will see that the date has changed on the file, and it will re-index (if I stated that correctly ).

This, however, doesn't really matter to me because I don't care if anyone on the internet can google my website or not. I personally refer people to my website by giving them the address.

You're absolutely wrong on all accounts. I know what I'm talking about...I have top 5 world-wide placements on Google and Yahoo under my belt.

1) Google has stated in it's webmaster FAQ that its spider cannot read content within flash. So when all of your text, images, and links are contained within an swf, they are completely invisible to the search engine.

2) Meta-data hasn't meant **** since 1999. If your site is flash-based then there's little room for meaningful html content. And if you try to add it frivolously or hidden to the page, the SE's will ban your site very quickly. You grossly underestimate the importance of index-able content on the page.

3) Here is a list of things you're missing out on with a flash-based website:
a) No readable text
b) No viewable images
c) No readable alt-tags because there are none
d) No internal pages to link to
e) No internal content to link to
f) No readable internal linking
g) No readable anchor text
h) No XML site map
i) No ability to take advantage of Google Webmaster Tools or Analytics effectively
j) No use of text formatting to add extra weight to particular content items
k) No meaningful W3C validation
l) No ability to use nofollow tags
m) Significantly fewer mod-rewrite capabilities
n) No effective use of AdWords
o) No way for SE's to validate whether your meta-data actually matches up with page content
p) No image indexing
q) Fewer pages on-site (yes this makes a difference, more content is better but you have no readable content)

These are all things I routinely examine and modify to help websites gain better rankings. You're losing out on a hell of a lot.

[NJMAN]

Relax Maxxy. I never said that you don't know what you are talking about...

I dont mean to argue with you, because I'm really not an argumentative person. But you are very quick to assume things.

I wasn't talking about "reading content within flash." I know search engine spiders have no way of detecting that.

I was talking about text in the index.html page. That's all.

[Alpha]

Alright, but in the grand scheme of things a small html shell will do little good.