Opinions On Our Website

MattCoops

If you developed that site in the early 90s it would be a great success. Nowadays not so much.
Look into xhtml markup and css layout.

As per my staticstics, about 15% of my monthly visitors do NOT have flash installed. Say goodbye to 1 out of 15 visitors (or potential customers).

I would ditch the intro. It serves no purpose, but to further impatient the user and create a disturbance.

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Matt with Cupan Custom Tile & Paint of Lowell, Massachusetts
Design and installation of ceramic tile and natural stone for floor, wall, and countertops
(978) 601-8774 | cupantile@gmail.com | view tile pictures and more

CF Construction

Those who don't have flash installed in their computer won't encounter a problem. There's a page (or at least it's supposed to load) when the visitor doesn't have flash, which gives them the link to download a flash player.


Either way, our targeted audience remains affluent individuals, so these people wouldn't buy a computer that has something basic such as a flash player missing. Quite frankly, anyone who's viewing our site on a 56k connection, we really don't target those clients for the simple fact that if you can't "upgrade" to what's "the norm" now because they're watching every dollar they spend, we definately don't want to deal with that type of person to begin with. We all know the kind......want the best quality of work and about 10 different tasks for the cheapest price possible and for the cost of just one task. No thanks.


Anyways, this site has generated traffic and it's actually working better than I expected. Furthermore, I'm having things done to it that'll enhance it for search engines as much as possible (again, generating a mass volume of traffic is not our main purpose for this site).

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CF Construction and Remodeling, Inc.
"Your Vision Is Our Commitment"
General Contractor In Miami

MattCoops

When I bought a new laptop, I removed the flash application.
And, with the growing popularity of visiting websites on mobile devices, you'd be surprised that some of their included browsers do NOT have flash versions installed.

It's ok to use flash, just answer this question though, why are you using flash in your online presentation?

__________________
Matt with Cupan Custom Tile & Paint of Lowell, Massachusetts
Design and installation of ceramic tile and natural stone for floor, wall, and countertops
(978) 601-8774 | cupantile@gmail.com | view tile pictures and more

CF Construction

I kind of miswrote what I did so in my last reply. I'm aware of the growing usage of people using their cell phones to visit the web. I have an iPhone and I find myself with this issue when I try going into a site that has flash. I can't view it whatsoever. However, in my honest opinion, I don't think if you're a home owner or business owner on the verge of doing some remodeling/construction work that you'll be doing your research on potential contractors (in case you don't have one in mind already) from your cell phone. As we all know, this is a very tideous process at times and doing your "research" via your phone's internet capability is just making that much more difficult for yourself.


The whole reason for using flash, it's simple, we wanted to stand out a bit more from the rest of the construction sites. As I indicated in my initial post, many sites that have to do with the construction industry for the most part they all look alike. Some are just awful, but at the same time, there's some that are very nice (in which I've seen some of those from people on this site). The flash was just a "visual enhancement", nothing more, nothing less. As I've previously stated on several replies already, this site wasn't made with "heavy online marketing" in mind. We knew there were several compromises with a flash site, one of which is the fact that we probably won't rank as high as others. As I've said though, we have this problem fixed through something else we've done to secure heavy traffic to our site, so either way the site will get its traffic, as it has so already and we'll be getting prospective clients calling us, as we've have begun getting calls already.

__________________
CF Construction and Remodeling, Inc.
"Your Vision Is Our Commitment"
General Contractor In Miami

SLSTech

CF - get a .mobi website for the cell phone users
Its been years since I have dealt with this, but as I recall there is a simple check when people hit your site & it automatically redirects them. It might also be as simple as a link at the top of the page - saying Mobile User - click here
You can then place pod casts, properly formatted pics, videos, etc... on that site

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Alabama Full Service Remodeling, Renovation, and Preservation by SLS Construction
Certified Energy Efficiency Audits, Ratings, Modeling, Verifications, & Consulting
Residential, Commercial, & Industrial Infrared Thermography Scans

CF Construction

SLS, that's great! So basically, all I have to do is go to Godaddy (that's where I have our domain name registered) and purchase the mobi option of the domain name, which will give visitors access to view the sites content, flash included, on their cell phones???


If so, that's great. Thanks for the heads up!

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CF Construction and Remodeling, Inc.
"Your Vision Is Our Commitment"
General Contractor In Miami

MattCoops

Here are some construction-type websites that DON'T use flash and definitely stand out above the rest of the crowd.

http://www.sierracustomkitchens.com
http://www.sutterbrown.com
http://www.greenstreetdev.com
http://www.freshairhomecleaning.com

__________________
Matt with Cupan Custom Tile & Paint of Lowell, Massachusetts
Design and installation of ceramic tile and natural stone for floor, wall, and countertops
(978) 601-8774 | cupantile@gmail.com | view tile pictures and more

Max Nomad

All great examples of tight website design. The last two remind me of high-end site templates you can buy from www.TemplateMonster.com ...

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Majestic-Tile, a division of Majestic Home Improvement, LLC.
http://www.majestic-tile.com/
My Publishing Company and Graphic Design Portfolio:
http://www.bgpublishing.com/

CF Construction

All those are nice looking sites, no arguing that. However, out of these links you posted and the other sites that standout like these without the need of flash, a huge bulk of construction related sites have overall the same look to it. We just want to visually standout. As I've indicated, this site wasn't done for "marketing" purposes in the sense that we are expecting this site to generate a mass volume of business. Our marketing efforts are being directed to other areas, in which it will be perfectly complimented by this "flashy" website.


I have taken many pieces of advice, not just in this thread, but in a few others that others have offered very seriously. I'm working on those improvements, but those who advice to get rid of the flash.....that won't happen. The site has been paid for already so it'll be ridiculous, not to mention a waste of money to start a brand new site from scratch.

__________________
CF Construction and Remodeling, Inc.
"Your Vision Is Our Commitment"
General Contractor In Miami

andeeznuts

Dude that site the work and all the above are awesome. Totally my style of design dont listen to all the rednecks on here.

CF Construction

Thanks for the props on the site, however, that little last comment might not be taken well by other members of the site.


Either way, thanks. I truly like how the site came out myself, but than again I'm a bit biased.

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CF Construction and Remodeling, Inc.
"Your Vision Is Our Commitment"
General Contractor In Miami

A W Smith

i though it was pretty neat, i didn't even mind the music much which usually is a thumbs down killer for me. I bet its the mp3 file thats killing the load speed though. have you flushed the cache of your browser and tested both with and without the mp3? nowdays some are browsing with their PDAs or cells so you have to consider them too. even the affluent will want to view sites with their blackberry's.

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Al Smith
http://www.awsmith.com

Max Nomad

For what it's worth:

While it's true that Search Engines don't like Flash, incorporating it into a website is not necessarily detrimental unless the *entire* website is based on Flash. This is primarily because Search Engine spiders can't (don't) process Flash SWF files. Simply put, where a human might look at a Flash page and see information and fancy graphics, a Search Engine spider will just see an unreadable block and skip it. Think of it as if a blind man is trying to listen to a television show but the audio has been replaced with Closed Caption or sign language. As long as the majority of your site content is in regular HTML web pages a spider should have no problem indexing it. A good rule of thumb to work by is that if you can't highlight the text on a web page, copy it, and paste it into word processor then a Search Engine spider can't handle it either.

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Majestic-Tile, a division of Majestic Home Improvement, LLC.
http://www.majestic-tile.com/
My Publishing Company and Graphic Design Portfolio:
http://www.bgpublishing.com/

Winchester

I think it's fine to stand out, and the site looks good.

One pet peeve I have is videos or music on websites that play automatically. If I want to listen or watch something I'll click on the play button myself thanks. I get really frustrated at sites like that because I spend the first minute on the site looking for the damn "STOP" button.

Just my opinion

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Ryan

Aiken Colon

Google indexes flash just fine. This official google blog is from June 30th of this year. They have been indexing flash for quite sometime now. There were rumors of this over a year ago. Flash sites were suddenly jumping in SERP rankings late last year. So google was working on it then, and just made it official June of this year.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/...awl-flash.html

There are many very well ranked flash sites out there. There are also a ton of web 2.0 sites that have no problems ranking as well. With proper SEO tactics with flash menus, buttons, banner they can rank and do rank as well. I think the sterotype comes from many people reading SEO message boards and thinking everyone on those boards is an expert. The people that are great at flash can also SEO flash.

Personally I would never do a site completly in flash, just like you would never do a sight strictly in HTML. But if that is the direction you have taken the only flaw I can really see with a totally 100% flash site is the fact that it is only 1 URL. For a site like mine that would just kill me. But for a construction site it would not be overly horrible.

If you want something in construction that would be more modern and still use flash I have often wondered why some of you guys don't do something like these guys. Go to their interactive page to build a swing set. It is an absolutly beautiful web 2.0 site that uses flash for designing purposes. If you were doing tile work and you wanted to truly show your customers how tile would look in a room of their house. Have them plug in dimensions and lay the tile themselves using flash. So on a so forth depending on your trade. Heck if you developed it enough someone could actually lay out a whole house with enough time and energy.

http://www.cedarworks.com/

design page: http://www.cedarworks.com/design/about_cedardesigner

And ranking page for the keyword "cedar swing sets": http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...dar+swing+sets

they are also 1st page on google for just "swing set" or "swing sets". That is a national type of search that has ranking competition from Toys R Us, Home Depot, and Lowes as competitors, just to name a few. Not too bad.

JJ

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Bosch Tools
Blower Door
Knipex
Energy Auditing

karunnt

It's not only on-page optimization. By my count Cedarworks has over 1300 backlinks (according to Yahoo) and over 170 (according to Google).

Aiken Colon

yeah that helps too. Although, that many backlinks on that old of a site is not really that many. This site has way more than that in 1/2 the time. The 13 year domain age helps a ton also. The sub 400k alexa doesn't hurt either.

Backlinks are definately not the end all either though, we have 3800+ and still struggle with keywords (not even in top 2 pages)

JJ

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Bosch Tools
Blower Door
Knipex
Energy Auditing

Max Nomad

Please forgive the length of this post... had to get heavy with tech for a few to elaborate on what I left out in my post about Flash. Like I said previously, I had oversimplified the description of Flash and its problems. Now it's time to explain why.

I didn't bother bringing this info into the discussion because (1) this SEO-capability is a development that happened earlier this year and still new, and (2) It's mainly Google and Yahoo who are rockin' this new indexing technology. Because it's been over a decade since Flash first hit the scene, there are still hundreds of search engines that are still going to take a while to get up to speed -- and countless websites that are all or mostly Flash-based.

This year, for every Flash-based site that someone has PAID good money to get Optimized for Google and Yahoo, there are literally hundreds of thousands of others that search engines still see as huge lumps of semi-transparent binary junk. The primary problem is Link Depth because you can't link to various levels within a Flash-based site the same way you can do a regular web site. The heavy use of Flash elements within a well-designed page isn't a problem (e.g. - incorporating a slide show or a fancy nav bar). Even with the way-overused term "Web 2.0 site", this type of site is also irrelevant in this discussion because by the very nature of the types of technologies that are characteristic of 2.0 sites, the use of Flash to the point where it becomes a problem for search engines means it's not 2.0 -- it can't be.

As far as the comments against making sites that are completely Flash-based, I fully agree. The problem is that millions of people around the world don't see it that way, so much in fact that completely Flash-based website templates are still hot sellers on sites like www.Templatemonster.com.

I've seen first hand how this can happen. Among other web design and ecommerce offerings, my former company used to make completely Flash-based web sites (yes, one SWF contains all) for car dealerships because that's what they demanded at the time. The Automotive Industry market forced us to go in that direction because the top car dealership chains in the country were doing it. Once many of them discovered that they had spent thousands of dollars to develop these multimedia-rich websites that search engines hated -- and would need to spend thousands more just to get some visibilty on a ranking pages -- they freaked out and suddenly Flash became a dirty word. It took the better part of 4 or 5 years to reverse this trend and it would have taken longer if it wasn't for things like Manufacturer-mandated templates, National Auto Dealers Association (NADA) trade shows and articles by JD Powers & Associates.

So why didn't I mention this breakthru about Flash optimization?

(Please bear with me, I'm getting to the point)

For every person who truly understands how to balance the various technologies to build an effective web presence, there are thousands of others who don't. We could fill a whole new thread with the reasons why.

An easier way to describe this situation with Flash and the web is to compare it to the early days of Electricity. Among his inventions, Thomas Edison had come up with Direct Current (DC) to power them. The problem was that DC power can't travel over long distances. George Westinghouse and company came along and introduced Alternating Current (AC) which was just as effective, much "greener" and could travel over long distances. It became known as the "War of the Currents" and for years Edison pushed DC and used his corporate influence to fight the widespread adoption of AC.

Of course, AC won and today we have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight to see the err of Edison's approach. Ironically, if you ask the average person who "pioneered" electricity and gave them the options to choose Edison or Westinghouse, they'll probably choose Edison all day long. Since Adobe now owns Macromedia (the company that created Flash), think of them as the Thomas Edison in this equation. Think of Flash being one of Edison's inventions where it brings great capabilities to the table but it's current implementation is awkward when it comes to fitting into the rest of the [web] environment. For SEO purposes Flash is still far from integrating as effectively as the other web technologies (e.g. - HTML, PHP, etc.). As a result, over time Adobe will also probably play the role of its own 'George Westinghouse' by making newer versions of Flash more and more SEO-friendly. The problem is that this process has just started and propagating the new and improved Flash versions throughout the 'Net will take some years.

All that said, this is why I didn't bother bringing up these recent developments regardingg Flash and SEO. We're contractors, not web developers, and so far every website that has come up in discussion has been using little or no Flash anyway. Since SEO seems to be at the forefront of everyone's thinking with their websites, to eliminate any confusion about "how much Flash is too much" (which almost always comes up sooner or later) I made a judgement call and left out the caveat about how search engines like Google are starting to handle Flash much better.

If you've read this far, thanks for being patient. After typing all that I need a nap...

__________________
Majestic-Tile, a division of Majestic Home Improvement, LLC.
http://www.majestic-tile.com/
My Publishing Company and Graphic Design Portfolio:
http://www.bgpublishing.com/

RobertsonBridge

as soon as it loads I'll let you know what I think.......

RobertsonBridge

well the skip intro link needs to show up BEFORE it starts loading. The main page looks great.