Flash Site

[lorraine]

Hi
I am in a bit of a quandry at the mo. My site is self written (by my husband, who is not a web designer) totally in flash. I am pleased with way it looks and we are getting quite a lot of hits, this is mainly through the way we have advertised the site through a combination of many free listings in local and business listing directories and a few paid listings in specific sites relating to our business - what we did was to put ourselves in customer mode and tried to search for a business such as ours and then submit our site for free or pay if we felt is worthy (ie not Thompson Local) .
I understand that flash is not exactly SE freindly.what I would like to do is port the site (or rewrite) to another app is this possible.
What is considered the easiest app to use that we can keep the look of the site.
This way we can work on getting the site higher ranked (or found) on its own merits rather than relying on third party sites.

Regards
Lorraine

[Pete Wailes]

Ouch...
To understand why this is such a difficult thing, you need to understand what flash is. Flash is esstially just a large number of images. Which is fine. Except that search engines can't *see* images. They can only see text. So all the normal SEO goes out the window. My personal advice would be get a specialist to do it, or to keep what you've got as a landing page (like an index.html page), and then take the other pages and make them html instead.

Sorry I can't be of more help, but this is somewhat past my league, and I suspect (no offence intended) yours too, unless you're a complete SEO freak.

[Joyous]

Hi Lorraine

I had exactly the same problem as you when I first put up my website. It too was written in flash and I absolutely loved it. It had some really cool animation on it and it got loads of positive feedback. Only problem was the search engines couldn't read it.

My husband has now rewritten in in HTML so it's now much more SE friendly. Apparently what you can do is have all the text in HTML with flash animations embedded within the pages. Hubby's been promising to do this to my site for ages but hasn't got around to it yet.

Regards

Joy

[peterjhale]

joy has an excellent site...

[JustOneUK]

flash is a bad bad idea, not only is itnot search engine friendly, but also some pc's do not even have the ability to view flash..pop! there go your customers.

buy your hubby a copy of dreamweaver or frontpage as a belated Cimbo present

Originally Posted by peterjhale

joy has an excellent site...

yes she does.

[Pete Wailes]

Better yet, get NVU, which is (I would argue) better than DW or FP, and is free!
Pete

[Magsite]

I've just got the one flash header. I've had loads of nice comments regarding it so I will keep it. Just hope my search engine results aren't effected!

Lisa

[Pete Wailes]

Shouldn't be. Using an image powered navbar does give better SEO, as you can stick in <alt> image tags, which they like. But having flash shouldn't have any negative affect in any way, and it does look pretty after all
Pete

[lorraine]

Thanks for all the comments guys.

Pete - NVU looks interesting - would you think my site (cateringbylorraine.co.uk) could be re written using NVU to look exactly as it does now.
secondly would my links stay in tact. As everyone has pointed out Flash is a bit of an own goal but as I have advertsied on many business directories, wedding specific and catering websites (all geographically local) although my site isnt shown - searching phrases such as : wedding caterer kent - event caterer - kent caterer - and so on returns results that we are just 1 click away. Some of the returns on searches gives us visibilty on the top 5 results of a possible 5m returns.
Bearing all this in mind is it worth the hassle of re writing.

Regards

Lorraine

[Pete Wailes]

Hey Lorraine.
That shouldn't be a problem. NVU is like Dreamweaver or Frontpage, in that it uses HTML. The layout is faily simple. To get the title bar and various graphics would be simple enough (simply take a screen shot of the page, paste into any graphics program (even paint would work), select the bit you want and save as a .jpg or .gif). The navbar would also be easy to do, and frankly, if you're that well ranked with flash, you'll get even better rankings with HTML, as the search engines will be able to *see* the text you've got.

My personal recommendation would be as follows, however. Go to www.elance.com and get someone to do it for you. It won't cost much (and there are tips and tricks to get the price down even lower than normal. If you want to know more about elance or the ways to best use it, send me a note or an email, and I'll get in touch.) Then, once it's all done, they'll give you the files, you pay them, and then you can make any changes or alterations you want. That way, you won't have the hastle of sorting the site yourself, so you can get on with more important things.

For SEO-ing the new site (if you do choose to get it done in HTML), come to me, and I'll send you a free copy of my Google Supercourse DVD set, on the condition that you tell me after seeing it if there are any questions you still have, or ways I can improve it.
Take care, and best wishes.
Pete W