Let's talk quickly on timely topics to elevate your web strategy. Fellow developers will be addressed as well, but in small doses, and wherever possible, in common-speak.
Having Flash movies on your site can create a site of magical proportions. I don’t think many people would agree that having Flash hurts a site’s image. Most often than not, Flash can help create “curb appeal” and impose a lasting impression on your site’s visitors. So should you include Flash with your site?
Companies often ask web design companies to create Flash websites. Many of these firms are capable designing an outstanding website, but how many are able to optimize its pages for the search engines? Flash often throws most programmers for a loop. Search engines certainly can’t spider Flash making any content contained within irrelavent in terms of SEO. What about the other obvious difficulties: long loading time, browser issues, firewalls that block Flash, lack of usability – and the statistics that show more than 80 percents of online users prefer non-flash sites? Considering that search engines cannot read Flash, what are the chances for such a website to be indexed anyway? So what’s the point in having an amazing website if it’s difficult to use and no one can find it?
The truth of the matter is that if you do choose to include flash in your site, do so sparringly. Never try to create an animated beast - one that takes an eternity to download and doesn’t help you out in terms of online marketing at all. CGI Pro can create beautiful, stylish Flash graphics while at the same time creating a site that ranks extremely well. You get the visitors, and you impress them. We do our best to balance both worlds.
A Google Sitemap is a simple XML document that lists all the pages in your Web site, but the Google Sitemaps program is actually much more important than that. In fact, the Sitemaps program provides a little peek inside Google’s mind - and it can tell you a lot about what Google thinks of your Web site!
Until Google Sitemaps was released in the summer of 2005, optimizing a site for Google was a guessing game at best. A Web site’s page might be deleted from the index, and the Webmaster had no idea why. Alternatively, a site’s content could be scanned, but because of the peculiarities of the algorithm, the only pages that would rank well might be the “About Us” page, or the company’s press releases.
As webmasters we were at the whim of Googlebot, the seemingly arbitrary algorithmic kingmaker that could make or break a website overnight through shifts in search engine positioning. There was no way to communicate with Google about a website - either to understand what was wrong with it, or to tell Google when something had been updated.
That all changed about a year ago when Google released Sitemaps, but the program really became useful in February of 2006 when Google updated it with a couple new tools.
So, what exactly is the Google Sitemaps program, and how can you use it to improve the position of your Web site? Well, there are essentially two reasons to use Google Sitemaps:
1. Sitemaps provide you with a way to tell Google valuable information about your Web site
2. You can use Sitemaps to learn what Google thinks about your Web site
Do we think that having a Google Sitemap is necessary - absolutely. Anything possible that can help boost exposure and traffic to a site is worth it. CGI Pro always includes a Google Sitemap with every site it creates.
Many people who come to us looking for a website have often asked the question - “What is xhtml - should my site consist of it?” Often times, most people can’t tell the difference between a site marked up in xhtml vs. html, and novices complain incessently about the characteristics the coding itself. XHTML is really nothing more than an html document holding itself up to xml standards. XTML is more difficult to program, yet a good coder can make quick work of it.
So is XHTML worth it? Yes, in my opinion XHTML is worth the hassle. It often makes for a more perfect webpage as the developer must make sure the code falls within strict standards. XHTML often reduces the size of a webpage tremendously, making for faster downloads which will make all of your dial-up friends happy. Since XHTML is a streamlined verson of its html equivilant, search engines may rank the page as being more “relavent”, and thus the may come up higher due to its professionalism and conciseness. Does having a webpage as valid XHTML guarantee better rankings? No, it does not. What it does do is create a better overall baseline standard.
