Blog Suggestions

There are tons of people making websites, how do you choose the right one for your business? Let’s face it, common conception is that anyone can put up a website.

Commercials on TV make it seem like you can log on to a service and have a site up in minutes. Not really. You must choose from cookie cutter templates that have restrictions on size and quantity of content. Do you have graphics sized correctly? If not, do you know how to do that? Text must fit the allowable area in the template. If you have more to say, you are out of luck. It is not that easy.

Kids are learning how to program a site in school. Does that mean that the neighbor’s teenager can design a site for you? If you were ever a kid yourself, you know it may not be much of a priority to them. There are so many reasons to put your project aside: dates, school work, computer games, sports and so on.  Your site may never get built, or it might get thrown together at the last minute. Remember those school projects we all put off?

A good website takes planning. A lot of thought needs to be put into a site to make it successful. Many web designers can create beautiful sites with lots of fancy effects, music and auto playing videos. All of that is fine if you are not really interested in selling your product or service.

A good designer will take the time to learn about your business and what you would like the site to do for your company. Each business is unique. A successful website has to be tailored to your customers. Yes that sentence is correct; tailored to your customers, not you. You and your web designer need to determine what will motivate your customers to act on what is presented on the site.

Lets get together to discuss your needs. Call us for a FREE consultation.

Flash pages; those fancy pages full of moving graphics or text, that flies in and out of the page can be hazardous to your web health and wealth.

Why?

First off, a Flash page increases the file size that has to be loaded for a visitor to view the page and continue into your site. How many times have you clicked off of a site instead of watching the little icon spin round and round? You must keep in mind that a visitor to your site may not be using a super fast internet connection. There are still people who cannot get high speed access to the web.

Second, many Flash pages load with music and sound effects that may not make every viewer happy. I have been surfing the web late at night only to stumble across a site that blared a loud tune as soon as the page loaded. I just about jumped out of the chair. Even if you supply a button to turn off the sound, there is no standard place for it to be located on a page. Visitors are left to search for it. A better solution is to provide an option to turn the sounds on, if a visitor so desires.

And now for THE Biggest Reason: The text and messages in a Flash document are not able to be read by the search engines, they are images. If you worked hard to create an interesting message in regular text and put it in the Flash movie; it still will not be able to be read by Google and other search engines. So the page will not rank very high in the search results based on the text on the page that is in Flash.

So is Flash good for anything? A site that is interested in showing off art or images can use Flash to its advantage. The best examples are sites for photographers, where the images speak for themselves. Often the goal of an artist site is to get the viewer so involved with the visuals that text or copy is not need. My personal opinion is even in that case, a site without Flash would bring more business to the owner.

Technology is constantly moving forward. There are new ways to make Flash sites more readable to the search engines and that should continue in the future. Only you can decide if the advantages Flash offers outweigh the disadvantages for you site.

You can call us Toll Free to discuss this and any other needs you may have for your website. 800-598-4008.

It is very easy to get carried away with all of the options available on a web site. You can change the color of every other word on a page, make text blink, change the size of the text or mix several different type fonts on one page. No matter how tempting this may be, resist it.

Website visitors are typically in a hurry. They want to see what you have to offer in the shortest amount of time possible. If you clutter up the text with lots of different text colors or fonts, it becomes confusing, hard to read and they leave.

Probably the worst thing you can do is have a song or other noise file start when a viewer arrives on a page. A lot of web surfers, me included, view the web late at night. The last thing I want to hear is a site that blasts me with noise as soon as it loads. Noise can be defined as any sound or song. Even if it is a soft sweet love song, every site visitor may not feel the same way about it.

Why risk putting off any of your site visitors? If the purpose of your site is to attract customers or clients, keep it simple. If you insist on playing music on your site, give a clear option to turn off the noise. Better yet, offer the option to turn on the music.