Template Customization

Designing a user friendly website by Ruchira Sharma

Posted on 28. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

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Summary – Here are some points to be kept in mind while designing a website that easy to browse through and serves its ultimate purpose of providing information. Legibility.

Content is the king, this is not to be forgotten ever! Any user coming to your website is there to get some information. If that information is hard to get, user will leave your website and go to Google to find out an alternate source.

Legibility of text is one of the most important things to be kept in mind. Selection of appropriate font-size and keeping adequate contract between text and background are too things that should always be kept in mind while making a website template.

Some researchers even claim that restricting font size by using CSS (where the design specifies a fixed font size value) is another thing that irritates users who like to customize the font size as per their visibility preferences.

Always keeping target user segment in mind while deciding the font-size.

Standardize navigation

* Always distinguish hyperlinked text from normal body text. Don’t forget to differentiate visited and unvisited links. * Include some of the key information-carrying terms in the anchor text itself to explain what users will find at the other end of the link. This will also aid in search engine optimization (SEO). * Try to avoid opening pages in new windows. A lot of PC owners have their pop-ups blocked, while the ones who don’t, feel lost when a new window opens.

Use of Media Elements

Flash and other media elements such as video, MP3 etc. should be used only when there is a need. Flash can be used to emphasize key information or better still to demonstrate some functionality. The latest version of Flash has amazing features to add functionality to a website.

So, the idea is to use media elements sensible and if-and-when required. Despite such good intentions, most of the Flash that Web users encounter each day is bad Flash with no purpose beyond annoying people. The one bright point is that splash screens and Flash intros are almost extinct. They are so bad that even the most clueless Web designers won’t recommend them, even though a few (even more clueless) clients continue to request them.

Browser compatibility

This must be the most annoying task for a web designer. Although a lot of browser incompatibility issues have been taken care in past 2-3 years, but even now we see some minor disagreements between the leading web browsers.

You like it or not, web users choose to browse web on the browser of their choice. So rather than turning them away just because they use a different platform, it is a must to design a website that performs reasonable alike on major web browsers (IE and Firefox for sure)

Form Pages

Try to keep your forms short and to the point. Big forms, featuring too many unnecessary questions and options tend to irritate a user. Try top cut all the questions that are really not needed. For example, do you really to know the first and last names in separate text boxes? Get your website analyzed for FREE to know what additional functionalities can be added to it. If you already know what functionality the web site requires, request a FREE quote now to get a detailed proposal.

About the Author
Vikas Malhotra is an established Internet marketing consultant having helped over 1000 businesses increase their visibility and sales online. He is an online branding expert with experience in design & development, affiliate marketing, online media planning, buying and also search engine marketing. To learn more, visit www.technology.mosaic-service.com.

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Cross Browser Compatibility

Posted on 27. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

There are literally hundreds of web browsers in use around the world. All of them implement the W3C document standards a little differently. Web designers must wrestle with these differences to make a web site work. This article discusses the effect those different implementations has on design.

What is Cross Browser Compatibility?

If a web page is completely cross-browser compatible, it will look more or less the same in all of the existing web browsers. The most commonly used browsers are Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Firefox and Opera.

Each one of these browser implements HTML, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) a little differently. Some difference only create cosmetic difference others can break the webpage. The situation gets worse because each browser is free to implement “enhancements” to the W3C standard version of each of these formats.

Then to compound matters even more the underlying operating systems also creates difference in how the computer displays graphical elements and text differently. When you add the fact that people are also using multiple versions of each of the browsers, no wonder web designers get headaches.

So what is a web designer to do?

Obviously, 100% compatibility with all potential browsers is impossible. But it is possible to design your web page so it will work in the most popularly used browsers.

To accomplish that, a web designer must write squeaky-clean code that conforms to the W3C standards to get consistent results across all browser platforms. The whole idea behind the standards is that if each browser adheres to the same set of rules, you will get more or less consistent results in all of the existing browsers.

Conforming can be a real challenge. It will limit some of the neater effects available in specific browsers. There are online code validators available. You can validate HTML code at http://validator.w3.org , the validator can also validate your CSS and links. The service is free.

The validator checks your code based on the DOCTYPE you specify on the webpage. The DOCTYPE tells the browser which version of HTML or CSS the web page is using.

HTML Editors

There are some compatibility issues associated with anything other than hand coding for HTML (and for that matter, even with hand coding.)

Best Choice – The best choice for compatibility is Dreamweaver but you cannot use layers. Layers must be converted to tables to be used.

Worst Choice – The worst choice is FrontPage. FrontPage is loaded with problems because it uses Microsoft and therefore internet explored specific code. Items that will not work in other browsers include:

* Marquees – you can use a JavaScript scroller to create a similar effect that will work in the most common browsers. * bgsound tag – this is IE specific. * Page Transitions – this is IE specific. * Front Page generated Style sheets – this is IE specific and can have unexpected results or crash other browsers. * Front Page generated DHTML – it is better to use JavaScript to create the effects you want since it is more likely to be cross browser compatible. * Hover Buttons – this is IE specific and has been know to crash browsers including older versions of IE. You can use JavaScript, flash or CSS to get similar effects.

Other HTML Editors – the rest of the HTML editors will fall somewhere between Dreamweaver and FrontPage in cross browser compatibility. You just have to test the code your HTML editor generates.

CSS Style Sheets

Not all of your style sheets will work correctly in all of the browsers. However, style sheets rarely crash a web browser, but sometimes the pages will be downright ugly if not completely unreadable. One of the major CSS problems is absolute positioning since most browsers do not support it and it will cause different block to overlap others and create a jumbled mess.

Flash

Flash is great for adding style to a webpage and Macromedia provides flash plug-ins for all of the major web browsers. But don’t build the entire site with flash. Browser for the blind, most handheld devices do not support flash.

A small but significant number of users don’t like it and don’t install the plug-in so they won’t be able to access a flash site. Also, search engines spyders can’t follow the links on a flash site and won’t index it.

Graphic Links

While these are attractive, they have the same problems as flash with browsers for the blind and hand-held devices. Always use the alt tag with graphics.

Bottom Line – even code that is validated may not work correctly in all the major browsers. The best way a web designer can create cross browser compatibility is to test all of their web pages in the most popular browsers to see what happens. Personally, I find that a combination of style sheets and tables works best to ensure my pages look good in all of the browsers.

About the Author
Warren Baker is an Internet business consultant for WebDesigners123. WebDesigners123 connects the Freelance Web Designer with Webmasters who need their services.

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Cascading Stylesheets: 5 Reasons To Use CSS

Posted on 27. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

Cascading Stylesheets become more and more important in today’s webdesign.

But before you decide to get started using CSS you should know why CSS is so important and what its advantages are.

1. The content is separated from the design

Because you are able to create a separate Stylesheet and link it to all your webdocuments, you have great control over how your website looks. So if you want to change a certain aspect of your page, you only need to alter one file: your Stylesheet!

This Of course, generates some great flexibility. This flexibility is not available when your website is using tables for layout, inline font tags or inline defined colors.

A single CSS file can contain positioning, layout, font, colors and style information for an entire web site.

2. You site uses less bandwidth and loads faster

Because stylesheets are so lightweight, your website will load much faster. The main reason is because you do not need table layouts anymore for the positioning of elements. Since text loads really really fast your website will be visible in a flash.

This means that visitors will be happier when surfing your website. They only have to download the Stylesheet once, and it’s automatically reused for every page. So the only thing that needs to be loaded is the actual content.

On average a website will load five to ten times faster if it makes use of cascading style sheets.

3. Your website will automatically gain better search engine results

With CSS, you can position any element, anywhere you want. So if your menu is at the bottom of your HTML document, you can bring it up using absolute positioning. The reason this is useful is to make sure the search engine spiders pick up the main content first.

Another advantage you automatically gain is that your HTML code is much cleaner. So the search engine spider will not have to separate the junk code from the real content.

So make sure you put your logo text and your menu at the bottom of your HTML document at put it at the top using CSS!

4. CSS is compatible with newer browsers

Because more and more browsers are used other than Internet Explorer on a Windows machine, you need to be sure that your website is accessible by all major and newer browsers.

By using webstandards, defined by the w3c, you are making sure your content is viewable in the future.

Because there are so many browsers these days, it is impossible to test your website in all these browsers on different configurations. Coding to standards is then the only practical solution.

5. CSS can be used to display the same content on different media.

Because you are able to define different stylesheets for different media you have great flexibility in presenting your content.

The printer for example, is a medium on itself. If someone prints out your website, you will be able to modify the look of it. Add an extra black and white logo, remove the advertisements and change the colors to black and white values. It’s all done easily by using cascading stylesheets. And the best thing is, visitors do not even have to know you created a new Stylesheet especially for the printer.

Stylesheets can also be created specifically for PDA’s and such. As you will understand, this adds some great flexibility to the presentation of your web document.

Conclusion

Cascading Style Sheets are created to make things easier. It gives you great control of your website and makes your visitors happy when they are surfing your website.

You are prepared for the future and will gain better search engine results automatically. Start using CSS to its full potential today! It will suit you well.

About the Author
Hilco van der Meer is an expert on Cascading Style Sheets. He is known as the creator of the “How To Master CSS” course.

This course discusses CSS in a fun and easy way. Apart from the book, he also created CSS training videos for the course. The course can be found at:http://www.HowToMasterCSS.com

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Editing CSS template

Posted on 27. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

These instructions pertain to Dreamweaver 4, although other versions would likely have similar instructions.

When you edit a CSS stylesheet that controls the text in your CSS template document, you instantly reformat all of the text controlled by that CSS stylesheet. Your edits affect all the documents linked to the style sheet.

To edit an external CSS style sheet:

• Open any document that is linked to the external CSS style sheet that you want to change.
• Do one of the following: Choose “Window > CSS Styles”, or click “CSS styles” in the Launcher.
• In the CSS Styles panel, right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Macintosh) and choose the Edit Style Sheet from the pull-down menu.
• Choose “Text > CSS Styles > Edit Style Sheet”.
• In the Edit Style Sheet dialog box, select the name of the external style sheet and click Edit. A second Edit Style Sheet dialog box displays the styles in the external style sheet. Select the style you want to edit.
• Edit the style however you wish.
  Click Save when you have finished editing styles.

Want to be able to run a small simple website and not have to spend anytime studying CSS and HTML and design software. . Our Cascading Style Sheets templates customization package is only $349.99 includes customizing (CSS version) site name, adding your logo, changing links, basic contact form page, and up to 5 other pages of content. Up loading and testing of site to your server also included. Note that the $62 price of the template is not included.

Learn more

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Optimizing Flash Files For The Search Engines

Posted on 22. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

What is a Flash Movie?

A flash movie, or shock wave file (SWF), is the file format published when a Flash movie is exported. A SWF file can also be exported by several other Macromedia or Adobe Products. The SWF is usually an animation, dynamic menu, or highly interactive web-based application embedded into an HTML page. Flash files, when exported correctly for the best web-based optimization, are compressed, thus making their file size lightweight. The SWF format is ideal for presenting vector-based, interactive and animated graphics with sound and video for the web. Vector images are ideal because they will not “pixilize” if stretched or compressed. Flash files can also contain text which can be animated, static or dynamically populated from external sources, such an XML file or a database. Text embedded in a Flash file, for many years, could not be read by search engines. However, recent updates by Macromedia are making this a possibility.

Problems with Flash and Search Engines

Historically, it has been difficult to get Flash content indexed and ranked by search engines. In the past, search engines, such as Yahoo and Google, did not spider Flash content as they could not read the compressed file and much of the text inside the SWF appeared as graphics to the search engines.

The main page of a web site, if Flash-based, rarely ranked well, unless off-page factors such as link popularity or link reputation were sufficient enough to carry the page. Flash files that were indexed by Google, Lycos and other search engines, which did not have any text or key words associated with them in the search engine results pages (SERP).

Techniques Used in the Past to Make Flash Visible to Search Engines

Traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques would help your site get indexed, but not rank for search terms. Every web site needs at least one HTML page to load into a browser. For a web site developed completely in Flash, developers would embed their flash files into an HTML document and then create the meta tags in the head section of the HTML file. They would also add descriptive HTML text for the search engines in the body section of the HTML page, then use CSS positioning and percentages to load the Flash move in a pixel-perfect location over the top of text. This particular technique should not be used any longer, as search engines will view this technique as an attempt to add hidden text, and hidden text will incur a penalty from the engines.

Another technique which could help your Flash ranking is to not compress your SWF files. One of the reasons search engines could not read flash files in the past is that the files are compressed. If the SWF is uncompressed, search engines can read the static text. This technique can be accomplished easily. Upon exporting a Flash file, you can set the compression to “not” if you want your text inside the Flash movie to be readable by the search spiders. However, this is not a good practice, as not compressing your SWF will increase the file size, consequently negating a major benefit to Flash file – a lightweight file.

What Macromedia has Done to Make Flash More Visible to Search Engines

In the past, Google did index Flash files. Anyone can test this fact out by searching in Google using the “filetype” operator to restrict your search. For example, try the following search: “Casino Games filetype:SWF”. The SERP will include over 200 Flash files, which are indicated by the “Flash” text to the left of the listing.

Some search engines are now using the Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK (Software Development Kit). For example, Google, AllTheWeb, Lycos, and other sites can readily display links to Flash content. Flash Search SDK is and open source tool that allows search engines to modify it to suit their needs. With this level of customization, it is likely that the major search engines will modify SDK, making it difficult for website owners to know exactly what information will be pulled out of the SWF file or how it will impact actual rankings.

The Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK can be found at

http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/download/search_engine. According to the Macromedia/Adobe web site, The SDK includes an application named ’swf2HTML’. Swf2HTML extracts text and links from a Macromedia Flash SWF file, and returns the data to an HTML document. Swf2HTML is provided as a compiled application and as a static library for linked library implementation. SDK can interoperate any links that are in the action script so long as adhere to the following criteria:

* The link is contained within single quotes (‘ ‘) or double quotes (” “), and
* The link prefix is HTTP, and
* The link suffix is HTM, HTML, CFM, SWF, JPG, JPEG, MP3, or WAV

By default SDK extracts the following text from your flash file:

* Text on stage in the current movie (dynamic text, static text, or input text that has an initial value assigned)

* Text on stage in a movie that is called with movieClip.attachMovie()

Google can see certain text in Flash files now, but how and where certain text gets extracted depends on what you do with that text in the Flash presentation. For example, text that is static or is used in a motion tween can be read as a single instance with SDK. However, some animation involves converting text into a symbol and then using multiple copies of that symbol to achieve a desired effect. This will create duplicate instances of your text to the SDK output, which may be viewed as duplicate content and not given much importance by Google.

Using the SDK tool, any developer can get the text output from the SWF and see how search engines view the extractable text of any SWF. On a Windows operating system, you can go to the DOS prompt and execute the swf2HTML application very easily. The following is an example from the DOS prompt: C:\sdk\swf2HTML -o test.HTML C:\sdk\crt_webfiles\test.swf

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques Used Historically for Flash Each Flash file does not need to be uploaded independently and called as a SWF file; rather a Flash file can be embedded in a standard HTML document. One of the best techniques is to create a modular web site, where there are several Flash files which make up the web page combined with standard HTML elements. A hybrid site such as this, works especially well, if your navigation uses traditional HTML links. You can use cascading style sheets to give the appearance of flash text links. This type of hybrid site will always rank better than an all Flash site – all other factors being equal. It’s also important to have your HTML page title correct, regardless of anything else. Several search engines look at meta titles first. In addition to the page title, you can add meta tags to the head of the file. Outside of the actual HTML page, off page factors are important. There has been much written in recent articles that reciprocal links are not as important any longer, but certainly, one-way links pointing to your site from highly relevant and high ranking pages will increase your page rank. In addition links from prominent directories, such as Yahoo and Business.com, placed in the most relevant categories will help. One-way inbound links from relevant sites is still the best way to increase your ranking with or without Flash.

There are programming techniques which work while in the Flash authoring environment. While you are in the Flash authoring environment, with your FLA open…click F12. It will generate the HTML page for you. Look at the code of the page; it creates a place for you to put the text and URL’s used in the Flash.

New SEO Techniques for Flash Today there are many techniques which can overcome the limitations of the past, where Flash files are concerned. With the inception of the new Macromedia Flash 8, there are techniques which can be implemented to greatly increase the ability of search engines to index Flash files and even rank for key words.

In the past, SWF files could not have titles. This is one important reason why Flash files didn’t rank well. This title limitation has now changed. Flash 8 does allow you to input meta data. Flash 8 defines two fields with meta data for all Flash files. These two fields are Title and Description. You can access the meta data fields under Document Properties. To add meta data, fill in the text fields and the search engines will know what info to display about your Flash file.

SDK is fairly intelligent in terms of recognizing text and links that are embedded in the file. If text is static or dynamically driven by an XML or text file, it can be read. If your content is dynamically driven it must be done so using the latest version of ActionScript 2.0. The SDK does parse ActionScript 2 byte code looking for links. It could conceivably find the link to the XML file that way and hand it back to a search engine.

As referenced earlier, certain text can be modified into a symbol rather than strait text. For example, a button might have the text output two or three times. Alternatively, tweened text has motion associated with the action. Tweens result in a single occurrence in the output from the extraction process. You should also notice that the link text in the Google results page is identical to the first couple of lines of text at the very top of the text extracted by swf2HTML. Armed with the knowledge of how SDK parses your content, you can manipulate text in your Flash Movies more carefully and make your content key word dense, easily indexable, search engine friendly and, with a little more skill, even optimized.

What is the gist of all this? Flash is still not the best solution for a pure SEO-based project, but their have been giant leaps forward by both the search engines and Macromedia in allowing your flash files to be indexed and even rank for the key word phrases you covet.

About the Author

This Article was written by Mike Goldstein. Mike is the SEO Manager at Rock Coast Media (http://www.rockcoastmedia.com), a Boston-Area search engine marketing firm that provides results-driven custom search marketing solutions.

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Flash and Search Engine Optimization

Posted on 21. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

Many web pages nowadays are embellished with Flash animation products, offered by Adobe. Flash technology allows, in a very simple manner, to insert small animated, vector-based drawings into your web pages.

Of course, these animations have some influence on the way your site is “seen” and indexed by the search engines. The problem of Flash Search Engine Optimization arises, which is a very serious matter in terms of conversion and web site profitability.

What Are Flash Animations?

First, let’s see what the structure of a Flash file is. When you create an animation, you get a file, named, for example, banner.fla. The “.fla” represents the Flash format extension. In order to display this file in a web page, you need to export it in Shockwave Format (extension .swf). It is this file, once exported, that you will be using for your web site.

If the animation you have created contains text, it won’t be taken into account by most of the search engines, as they don’t pay much attention to this format. Still, there are search engines (e.g. Google, dir.com, FAST Search) that know how to read the text inserted in the Flash animations. A web page (or even a site!) that is built entirely in Flash will therefore pass almost “unseen” by search engines, which index, almost exclusively, text content in HTML format. Nevertheless, the HTML file that launches the Flash animation will be crawled by search engine’s spiders.

Why Use Flash for Sites?

It is not a secret for anyone that search engines don’t really like sites that are built using Flash exclusively. These sites rarely contain enough relevant text to allow a good indexing. Above that, not all spiders can read the content of a .swf file. Flash is used though every now and then for mini-sites or for campaign sites.

Flash is interesting for at least two reasons:

* It maximizes the animation’s impact, which is appreciated in the Internet interactive and visual environment. Also, leaving aside the size of the files, it is worth mentioning that Flash (mainly vector-based) is still “lighter” than videos (not interactive) or simple pixel photos (not animated).
* It can be combined successfully with other technologies (e.g. PHP, MySQL, XML, images, video, sound, etc.). It is therefore perfectly possible to create a dynamic web site in flash that also has content.

A Flash animation placed on a web page has certainly more significance than a simple image. People like to be visually stimulated, and this is the perfect instrument to attract prospects and eventually convince them to buy a product. Perception is everything. Marketers want to offer a great looking package, and customers want to receive it.

Is Flash Friendly or Evil?

Pro’s

* It allows the designer to put more content in a small-sized space without damaging the layout.
* It is an easier way to present slide shows or movies.
* It is a great tool to create banners and ads, and even Flash videos.
* It’s a good instrument for creating great visual impact and drawing attention to specific points of interest on a web site.

Con’s

* Flash requires quite a lot of bandwidth – Flash files, especially if they use sounds or embedded movies, will take a long time to load, and the visitor may not have the best connection to the Internet and, obviously, the patience to wait.

* Most search engines don’t like and don’t index Flash – not all the search engines can crawl and index the content of Flash, and if they do, it’s not free of errors. They won’t be able to direct the visitors to the proper page.

* You could be at the mercy of the Flash developers – if you use 3rd party Flash developers, they might code the project so that you won’t be able to make any changes and – hire them again, even for the smallest modification. This could actually cost you a pretty penny.

* The “Back” button is usually disabled – if the Flash designer has used some trick such as meta refresh in order to disable the browser’s Back button, it is highly probable that the visitors might get frustrated and not want to start browsing your site over and over again. So they will leave. Besides that, Google’s AdWords doesn’t approve pages that have the Back button disabled. So, beware of this if you intend to promote your web site by using a PPC campaign.

* Flash doesn’t care about the visitors’ needs – movies that seem endless- sounds that you cannot turn off they will drive your visitors away.

* Splash Pages don’t favor your visibility – they lack the text that contains the keywords identified as pertinent to your services / products; they only include one outgoing link and, most of the times, no back-link from another page; they often include re-directions, and most of the search engines will not include re-directions in their page index.

What You Can Do About It

Optimizing Flash for the so-demanding search engines is not an easy task. The effort that must be done and the amount of energy that must be spent on SEO for Flash are far greater than for the optimization of a HTML site.

Following are some tips on how to optimize Flash on your web site:

* One of the best methods to optimize your Flash pages is to use the NOEMBED tag, the same way the NOFRAMES tag is used to index the sites built on frames. It’s between the noembed and noembed tags that text content must be inserted after you have defined a clear search engine optimization strategy for Flash.
* Another Flash SEO method is the use of a CSS element, .div (which incorporates search engine accessible content), associated with a JavaScript function called SWFObject. This will allow detecting when browsers can display and view Flash. Search engine spiders that cannot handle Flash will choose to view the primary content, which contains links, headings, text, etc. in this case, Flash will not create any problems. It may not cause your site to rise spectacularly in the SERPs, but it will eliminate most of the ranking disadvantages that come with Flash sites.
* If you’re going for the “all-Flash” approach (although most SEO practitioners strongly advise against this), there is also the possibility to create a HTML version of the Flash site and to offer that one for the spiders to index. You can create distinct HTML pages for each Flash page, and install the Flash movie on each page. If the visitor can handle Flash, they will see it. Otherwise, there will still be the HTML version, also accessible to search engine spider for indexing. You might lose the seamless effect that comes with Flash, but you will gain visibility and, possibly, some good ranking.
* Use the Flash Search Engine SDK tool called swf2html. It will extract the text from the Flash file and transfer it into a simple HTML document, so you don’t have to do it manually. You will thus be able to see what the search engine spiders see.

Also, it would be useful to take into account some other aspects that might make a difference in your endeavor to make your Flash site compatible (and readable) with search engines.

Seriously consider the following suggestions:

* Avoid creating all-Flash-sites. They lack page structure, content and internal linking, while page titles cannot be well organized.
* Create descriptive page titles and META descriptions (use the title and meta tags).
* Check that your Flash links point to HTML pages and not to other Flash pages.
* Make sure you use a clean design for your pages and your site.
* Allow web users to choose if they want to skip or turn off animations and sounds.
* Go through all the possible solutions for Flash search engine optimization.
* Make sure your site is accessible for a variety of browsers (don’t leave out WAP compatible mobile phones).
* Check that your code is valid and that it complies with standards. (read also: “Does your Website Need W3C Validation?“)
* Make sure that your Flash web site functions correctly in Internet Explorer.

We suggest that you also read the related article Effective SEO through good code structure.

About the Author
Read more free software marketing articles.

Copyright © 2007, http://www.avangate.com all rights reserved. This article was written by Adriana Iordan, Web Marketing Manager at Avangate B.V. Avangate is a complete ecommerce provider for shareware sales

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How to SEO Flash

Posted on 16. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

Flash gets a bad rap, undeserved in my opinion, for harming search engine visibility. Why are search engine optimization (SEO) practitioners concerned about Flash, and how can we SEO Flash content? The main problem with Flash is that search engines don’t yet understand it, and probably won’t in the near future. Flash includes logic and can take input from the visitor, but search engines are designed to handle static content. Flash is actually a running program, so it’s much harder to analyze than plain HTML code.

The leading web development tool, Adobe Dreamweaver, embeds Flash in web pages with code that fails to provide accessibility for visitors or search spiders who cannot handle Flash. Instead of using the default code, my recommendation is to hand code Flash pages with primary HTML content, and a method of automatically testing for Flash support before attempting to insert the movie. The primary HTML content can be search optimized as if the Flash wasn’t there, while the Flash provides an enhanced user experience for those visitors who have the necessary Flash player.

The April 11, 2006 release of Microsoft’s popular Internet Explorer (IE) browser includes an update (“Eolas”) that prevents ActiveX-based Flash controls from working properly. When the user attempts to interact with the Flash, a tool tip appears, stating, “Click to activate and use this control.” That extra click is an annoyance. Fortunately, the programming technique described in this article solves the Flash Eolas problem.
Requirements for Successful Use of Flash

Flash animation is a great way to present complex content because it allows the designer to put more content in a finite space, without wrecking page design. For technology sites, Flash is an ideal way to present a slide show or movie explaining a complex product. At the other end of the spectrum, art and entertainment sites have a real need for multimedia, and Flash is the perfect solution.

When using Flash, we’d like to satisfy each of these objectives:

* Clean design
* Search Engine Optimization
* Accessibility for a wide variety of browsers, including screen readers and mobile phones
* Code validation and standards compliance
* Correct functionality with IE

SEO Flash Programming

My recommended Flash SEO method uses a DIV with search-engine-accessible, primary content, and a Javascript function called SWFObject() to detect when browsers are capable of viewing Flash. When an appropriate version of Flash player is present, the Javascript manipulates the page’s document object model (DOM) to replace the primary content with the Flash movie. Most search engine spiders can’t handle Flash, so they will elect to view the primary content. The primary content may contain links, headings, styled text, images—anything we can add to an ordinary HTML page. With SEO copyediting and coding skills applied to the primary content, Flash becomes a non-issue.

Flash accessibility programming isn’t spamming, as long as the primary content and the visible movie are essentially the same. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) specifically states that multimedia content should have an alternative representation available. Accessibility programming creates the benefit of presenting visual information without losing the visitors and search engines who depend upon textual content.

SWFObject and UFO

Please visit Geoff Sterns’ blog, deconcept, for a full explanation of SWFObject() and to download the SWFObject.js file required for this solution. Another open source solution, UFO (Unobtrusive Flash Objects), is available from Bobby van der Sluis. Both are conceptually similar.

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How to make a Flash Contact form Work

Posted on 13. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

foamers.net will install this script for you for as little as $80 a pop. Should you wish to employ our design team to make your Flash contact form work hop on over to the contact page and talk to us..

If you have been searching around trying to figure out what is the easiest way to make a Flash contact form work, then this is it. In this tutorial you will learn how to create a Flash contact form. PHP is provided. Very simple..

First of all, please see How to make a contact form work demo movie.

Then you should DOWNLOAD the following php script, save it as contact.php:

[code lang="php"]
< ?php

$your_company = $_GET['company'];
$your_name = $_GET['your_name'];
$your_phone = $_GET['phone'];
$your_email = $_GET['email'];
$your_message = $_GET['message'];

// change this to whatever you needed to be.
$recipient = 'you@yourdomain.com';

//you can make it say anything you want
$subject = 'Someone has submited your form';

// Do not edit anything else beyond this point
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1';

$content = "
";
$content .= "Company: " . $your_company . "
";
$content .= "Name: " . $your_name . "
";
$content .= "Phone: " . $your_phone . "
";
$content .= "E-mail: " . $your_email . "

// The mail() function allows you to send mail.
mail($recipient,$subject,$content,$headers);
?>

[/code]

Put your e-mail address as shown in a video tutorial and then save this file. Place this contact.php file in the same folder where you have your SWF movie. That’s all!

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Flash vs. HTML What’s all the hipe about?

Posted on 13. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

For instance before buying Flash template ask yourself, Why not HTML? HTML is cross browser compatible, doesn’t require a plug-in and loads faster. From a usability standpoint remember sites are about giving users what they want in as minimal amount a time as possible In other words don’t make me have to think. I don’t have time to figure out how to use your fancy little button thingie.

So why bother with Flash Templates?

User experience: When used judiciously Flash templates can be used to emphasize key information or better still to demonstrate some functionality. For instance on a site with multiple pages you can use ActionScript to quickly show or hide information faster than HTML can reach the server and return again to show a new page. The latest version of Flash has amazing features to add functionality to a website…

Cross browser compatible: if the user does have the Flash plug-in your site will look exactly the same on all browsers. In addition the TexFiled.StyleSheet class gives you the ability to use style sheets. What the heck is style sheet? If this is the first you’ve ever heard of style sheets and you have no idea what I’m talkiing about, you should go check out “What is CSS” first. Are you going? You really should go… I want to hear that mouse clicking!

Flexibility: ActtionScript has come a long way sense the early days of Flash 5. You can do a lot more with ActionScript in Flash than with JavaScript in HTML.

The plug-in issue: not much of an issue here, from 1999 on the Flash plug-in has been pre-installed by the manufactures on all new machines, so chances are your target audience does have the plug-in.

The next thing you need to ask yourself is, will my Flash site be stand-alone operation or will it need to send data to and from the outside world? Meaning, will you need to pass data back and forth from Flash to some server side script. Personally I would prefer to stick with HTML here, unless of course the entire site is Flash in which case I would have to choose Flash for all continuity purposes Be warned however, users recognize and are much more accustomed to using HTML form elements than they are of Flash form components hence less likely to understand how to use them.

That being said, you should ask yourself the following questions. How comfortable am I around ActionScript and the Flash-editing environment and will I have the time to spend required to edit my template, or would it be more convenient and economical to outsource the work?

Unlike HTML files that don’t require any particular editing software, an FLA file is the source Flash file that contains all animation, graphics and ActionScript associated with the template. To edit this file you would need to have some familiarity with terminology and concepts pertinent to ActionScript and the Flash-editing environment, in addition to Macromedia Flash MX 6 or higher installed on your computer.

For those who may be less willing to take on the challenge, I’m offering one other alternative and that is to outsource the work. If you think you haven’t the time or if sitting at the computer all day just isn’t your thing then why not let an expert handle it. At www.foamers.net we will customize any template to fit your individual business needs. Our budget Flash customization package is only $689 (includes the cost of the template a $62 value), customizing the site name, adding your logo, making sure all links are operable, a contact form page, and integrating customers content throughout 5 pages. The best way to demonstrate exactly how we turn these ready built website templates into your own unique online presence is to show you our work. The portfolio will give you an inside look on the ideas and creativity we bring to the templates we customize. Click here to visit us now.

So we learn that with the right combination of gear and technical knowledge you certainly can make your site more stunning and professional looking by going with Flash template’s far more advanced interactivity above HTML. In sum you have some decisions to make depending on what skills you posses, overall project budget and the amount of time you may be able to devote to completing your task if you so decide to do it yourself.

To learn more about passing data to Flash from a server-side script please visit our template customization blog which contains articles covering advanced aspects of editing the Flash portion of your website template.

About the Author:
Dave Collado is the Senior Design Consultant at www.foamers.net who provides quality website templates customization, Flash templates customization, CSS templates, web design tutorials, and many other web design and web hosting services. This article may be republished providing it remains fully intact.

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Lead Generation – 5 Keys to Generating Leads With Minimal Waste and Maximum Effectiveness

Posted on 08. Mar, 2007 by Chestin Salisbury - EzineArticles Expert Author.

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osCommerce and osCommerceTemplates explained

Posted on 07. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

Shopping is an activity that we all have experienced. By either going to the grocery store to pick up eggs or to the mall to buy clothes. Today, with the development of the computers and of the Internet, some brilliant minds thought that it would be even better if people who do not have enough time to spend in shops, could buy stuff over the Internet. Revenues from ecommerce stores have increased consistently over the past few years. Logically, online shopping is strictly connected to the use of websites, because through the sites, people can view products and place orders.

First, whenever you plan to launch an ecommerce site, one of the most important things that you should plan is the layout. Why? Simple, image and first impression. When someone visits your online store, you want them to feel as if you’re a professional, not somebody who does not care about the appearance of their business. If the site is not professional, would you want to give these people your credit card information? If you went to buy a new car and the car you were interested in had “wash me” scribed into the dirt covered hood, would you buy it? Also, the layout should be clear and easy for your customers to navigate. Now, the next question is, how can someone have an ecommerce store like this when their knowledge about html is little or the budget is not very big? This question has two answers.

Oscommerce and oscommerce templates. First I’ll explain oscommerce. Oscommerce is shopping cart software used to perform the duties of an ecommerce store. Duties such as maintaining inventory of products with photos and descriptions, processing orders and payments, etc. This software is open-source and available for free. Anyone can download and install oscommerce and in minutes have there own ecommerce store. Oscommerce stores come with lots of options and can be customized.

This brings me to oscommerce templates. For many beginners or advanced users, oscommerce templates are the perfect option. They are already made so you can, in a way, preview the look of your site. Also they can be modified and updated, and moreover, they have no errors, so there won’t be any worries concerning a line or a box not being where it should.

Oscommerce templates are made by web designers and developers and come in several themes and colors. There are many such templates that can be found on the Internet. For the most part you must pay for them. Some may be free, but you usually get what you pay for. Keep in mind that the price you will pay for an oscommerce template is going to be much less than what you would pay a web designer to create a personalized ecommerce site for you. Sometimes thousands less.

If you decided not to use a template, it would also take much longer to develop your ecommerce site from scratch. On the other hand, using oscommerce templates give you the template at the time of purchase. Also, the template provider may provide configuration services for the template. This would allow you to do everything with one company at the same time.

Finally, I want to say that it is not a strike against you to use an oscommerce template instead of hiring a web designer. This is often what designers and webmasters will tell you when you decide to use a template. These templates are made for you to use. Most templates are actually created and used by web designers all the time.

Before starting your own ecommerce website you should think of what you really want to do, how your site should look, and then choose from the large number of oscommerce templates. Good luck. This solution is ideal for beginners who want to start their own online shopping site or web designers who want to save time.

About the Author
For more details about oscommerce templates visit http://www.mayviktemplates.com/oscommerce.php

This article was written by Kyle M. http://www.mayviktemplates.com

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How Do Search Engines Work – Web Crawlers

Posted on 05. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

In my last article, PageRank in a nutshell, I went over some basic information about what PageRank is and what it can do for you. This next article proves even deeper in to some specifics on how do search engines actually work. Later in this series we will also focus on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) what it is, and the right way to implement it.

Article: You would be using search engines so you know how they work from the user perspective. From your own experience as a user, you also know that only those results that list at the top of the heap are most likely to attract you. It doesn’t amuse you to know that your search yielded 44316 results. Perhaps even number 50 on your list will not get your custom or even your attention. Thus you know that getting listed on the top or as near to the top is crucial. Since most of the search engine traffic is free, you’ll usually find it worth your time to learn a few tricks to maximize the results from your time and effort. In the next section, you will see how search engine works – from your perspective as a website owner. It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search. There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ’spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day. Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page. Most of the top-ranked search engines are crawler based search engines while some may be based on human compiled directories. The people behind the search engines want the same thing every webmaster wants – traffic to their site. Since their content is mainly links to other sites, the thing for them to do is to make their search engine bring up the most relevant sites to the search query, and to display the best of these results first. In order to accomplish this, they use a complex set of rules called algorithms. When a search query is submitted at a search engine, sites are determined to be relevant or not relevant to the search query according to these algorithms, and then ranked in the order it calculates from these algorithms to be the best matches first.

Search engines keep their algorithms secret and change them often in order to prevent webmasters from manipulating their databases and dominating search results. They also want to provide new sites at the top of the search results on a regular basis rather than always having the same old sites show up month after month. An important difference to realize is that search engines and directories are not the same. Search engines use a spider to “crawl” the web and the web sites they find, as well as submitted sites. As they crawl the web, they gather the information that is used by their algorithms in order to rank your site.

Directories rely on submissions from webmasters, with live humans viewing your site to determine if it will be accepted. If accepted, directories often rank sites in alphanumeric order, with paid listings sometimes on top. Some search engines also place paid listings at the top, so it’s not always possible to get a ranking in the top three or more places unless you’re willing to pay for it.

Let us now look at a more detailed explanation on how Search Engines work. Crawler based search engines are primarily composed of three parts.

A search engine robot’s action is called spidering, as it resembles the multiple legged spiders. The spider’s job is to go to a web page, read the contents, connect to any other pages on that web site through links, and bring back the information. From one page it will travel to several pages and this proliferation follows several parallel and nested paths simultaneously. Spiders frequent the site at some interval, may be a month to a few months, and re-index the pages. This way any changes that may have occurred in your pages could also be reflected in the index. The spiders automatically visit your web pages and create their listings. An important aspect is to study what factors promote “deep crawl” – the depth to which the spider will go into your website from the page it first visited. Listing ’submitting or registering’ with a search engine is a step that could accelerate and increase the chances of that engine “spidering” your pages.

The spider’s movement across web pages stores those pages in its memory, but the key action is in indexing. The index is a huge database containing all the information brought back by the spider. The index is constantly being updated as the spider collects more information. The entire page is not indexed and the searching and page-ranking algorithm is applied only to the index that has been created. Most search engines claim that they index the full visible body text of a page. In a subsequent section, we explain the key considerations to ensure that indexing of your web pages improves relevance during search. The combined understanding of the indexing and the page-ranking process will lead to developing the right strategies. The Meta tags ‘Description’ and ‘Keywords’ have a vital role as they are indexed in a specific way. Some of the top search engines do not index the keywords that they consider spam. They will also not index certain ’stop words’ (commonly used words such as ‘a’ or ‘the’ or ‘of’” so as to save space or speed up the process. Images are obviously not indexed, but image descriptions or Alt text or “text within comments” is included in the index by some search engines.

The search engine software or program is the final part. When a person requests a search on a keyword or phrase, the search engine software searches the index for relevant information. The software then provides a report back to the searcher with the most relevant web pages listed first. The algorithm-based processes used to determine ranking of results are discussed in greater detail later.

These directories compile listings of websites into specific industry and subject categories and they usually carry a short description about the website. Inclusion in directories is a human task and requires submission to the directory producers. Visitors and researchers over the net quite often use these directories to locate relevant sites and information sources. Thus directories assist in structured search. Another important reason is that crawler engines quite often find websites to crawl through their listing and links in directories. Yahoo and The Open Directory are amongst the largest and most well known directories. LookSmart is a directory that provides results to partner sites such as MSN Search, Excite and others. Lycos is an example of a site that pioneered the search engine but shifted to the Directory model depending on AlltheWeb.com for its listings.

Hybrid Search Engines are both crawler based as well as human powered. In plain words, these search engines have two sets of listings based on both the mechanisms mentioned above. The best example of hybrid search engines is Yahoo, which has got a human powered directory as well as a Search toolbar administered by Google. Although, such engines provide both listings they are generally dominated by one of the two mechanisms. Yahoo is known more for its directory rather than crawler based search engine.

Search engines rank web pages according to the software’s understanding of the web page’s relevancy to the term being searched. To determine relevancy, each search engine follows its own group of rules. The most important rules are.

- The location of keywords on your web page; and – How often those keywords appear on the page ‘the frequency’

For example, if the keyword appears in the title of the page, then it would be considered to be far more relevant than the keyword appearing in the text at the bottom of the page. Search engines consider keywords to be more relevant if they appear sooner on the page (like in the headline) rather than later. The idea is that you’ll be putting the most important words – the ones that really have the relevant information – on the page first.

Search engines also consider the frequency with which keywords appear. The frequency is usually determined by how often the keywords are used out of all the words on a page. If the keyword is used 4 times out of 100 words, the frequency would be 4%. Of course, you can now develop the perfect relevant page with one keyword at 100% frequency – just put a single word on the page and make it the title of the page as well. Unfortunately, the search engines don’t make things that simple.

While all search engines do follow the same basic rules of relevancy, location and frequency, each search engine has its own special way of determining rankings. To make things more interesting, the search engines change the rules from time to time so that the rankings change even if the web pages have remained the same. One method of determining relevancy used by some search engines ‘like HotBot and Infoseek’, but not others ‘like Lycos’, is the Meta tags. Meta tags are hidden HTML codes that provide the search engine spiders with potentially important information like the page description and the page keywords.

Meta tags are often labeled as the secret to getting high rankings, but Meta tags alone will not get you a top 10 ranking. On the other hand, they certainly don’t hurt. Detailed information on meta-tags and other ways of improving search engine ranking is given later in this chapter.

In the early days of the web, webmasters would repeat a keyword hundreds of times in the Meta tags and then add it hundreds of times to the text on the web page by making it the same color as the background. However, now, major search engines have algorithms that may exclude a page from ranking if it has resorted to “keyword spamming”; in fact some search engines will downgrade ranking in such cases and penalize the page.

Link analysis and ‘clickthrough’ measurement are certain other factors that are “off the page” and yet crucial in the ranking mechanism adopted by some leading search engines. This is quickly emerging as the most important determinant of ranking, but before we study this, we must first look at the most popular search engines and then look at the various steps you can take to improve your success at each of the stages – spidering, indexing and ranking.

Google is a privately held company that was founded by two Stanford graduates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. Dr. Eric Schmidt, the CEO joined in 2001 and by the end of the year the company had shown a profit.

Yahoo has shown sales of around $ 225 million in the second quarter this year (inching close to the 1 billion mark over the year), and a net income of $ 21.4 million. Yahoo is a portal and not a pure play search engine company. It was founded by Jerry Yang.

Google is the search engine that powers the search directory for Yahoo. This partnership started in the year 2000 and recently there was a report that the contract is being extended. Last year, Yahoo paid Google about $7.2 million for Web search services. Inktomi has been a contender too for Yahoo’s business. Google also provides an Apple-specific Search Engine specifically tailored to deliver highly targeted results related to Apple Computer and the Macintosh computing platform.

The Apple-specific search engine, located at www.google.com/mac.html, makes searching for everything from Apple’s corporate information to product-related news faster and easier.

Inktomi has a robust networking business and a foothold in enterprise search. However, it recently posted deep losses. The company reported a wider net loss in the second quarter 2002, with lower revenue. Its loss broadened to $104 million or 72 cents a share, from $58.3 million, or 46 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue fell to $30.8 million from $39.5 million a year earlier.

To stay healthy and competitive in consumer search, Inktomi introduced in the last year a program that generates fees from Web sites listed in its database. Inktomi charges companies such as Amazon.com and eBay to list more than 1,000 Web addresses; they might pay anywhere from 5 cents to 40 cents per click when Web surfers jump to their pages from Inktomi’s database. The revenue generated from paid inclusion is shared with partners such as MSN and Overture.

For March 2003, according to a study by Jupiter Media Metrix, there were an estimated 114 million Internet users online in the US at work or at home, 80 percent of whom are estimated to have made some type of search request during the month.

About the Author
Ken Mathie is a marketing consultant based in Darwin, Australia. His specialities include Online & Offline Business Development and Management, Training, Marketing and Software Development.

Stop knocking yourself out trying to build websites the hard way! If you can type an email – you can build a website – Build your website in minutes – Easy Website Builder. Click Here and watch the video

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Market Your Business On A ShoeString

Posted on 05. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

Everyone in the world of business understands the important role marketing plays in growing a business. It is the strategy that you use to get your particular product and/or service known to your target market. It is done in an effort to increase sales and generate revenue.

Unfortunately, many small businesses find themselves in a vicious cycle of “no money to advertise = no sales” and “no sales = no money to advertise”. They struggle with not having money to advertise and market their business which results in not being able to generate more sales and revenue. Since they are not able to increase their revenue they continue to not have the money available to invest back into marketing strategies. We all know that consumers are not able to purchase products/services that they do not know exist.

Many small businesses buy into the myth that it takes a big budget marketing strategy to generate more business. This is simply not true. The focus needs to be on the quality of the advertising instead of the cost of it. If you have a limited marketing budget you can still form a marketing plan that will work for your company.

Be Creative Your initial step to cheap marketing tactics is to create a website for your business. This is a cheap and relatively easy task to accomplish. There are many different hosting companies that also have website packages included. Sign up for hosting with a company and many will have templates you can use to build your initial site. This is a great way to advertise your business with little investment.

Your next step will be to create an electronic newsletter. This will be used to share information with not only your former customers but potential customers as well.

While you are in the writing mode, you will want to create a blog and write in it daily. You can create a blog for free and you will initially submit postings daily. Once your business is growing and you are getting more traffic, you can slow down your posting to every few days. You do not want to ignore your blog completely, however, as this is a great way to drive traffic to your site and develop a relationship with potential customers.

Write articles about your business and post them in online article directories. Make sure you are including links back to your own website. This is usually done in the “About The Author” section of the articles.

Use the Power of Email Marketing Along with your website hosting package, you will receive an email account. If you do not already have a dedicated business email account, you will want to utilize the email account that comes with your hosting package. This will be beneficial as those who may want additional information on your products and/or services will be able to contact you with their questions. It is important, however, to check your email daily. You would not want potential customers to lose interest in your products because they did not get a prompt reply.

Additionally, whenever you send out an email, use a signature that promotes your business. Every email you send out will have a reminder at the bottom of your business and what you offer.

Word of Mouth Has Power Although word of mouth advertising is a slower process than other marketing avenues, it is a great method. Word of mouth is absolutely free. You can also consider trading products/services for marketing. Depending on the services you offer, you may be able to locate a reputable marketing company who will represent your business in exchange for products/services from your business.

One other idea is to turn your car into an advertising platform. Getting a magnetic banner ad made for your car can be relatively inexpensive. Put the magnetic banner on your car door and everywhere you go you will be advertising your business.

Network Network Network Business cards are a very inexpensive way of promoting your business. Handing out business cards is like handing out mini commercials. Check for trade shows and conferences in your area where attendees may be interested in your product and/or service. You can also look into setting up a booth at these trade shows in order to promote your business.

Once you start generating sales, use whatever funding you can allocate for fast marketing prospects that will generate customers for your business. Fast Marketing strategies include radio and television ads, professional brochures, etc.

The average consumer needs to hear and/or see an ad up to seven times before they make a decision to purchase. Using multiple marketing techniques not only allows you to reach more people, it can help you turn those “fence-sitters” into cash-in-hand customers.

About the author:
Jessica is an Internet Marketer who also enjoys sharing what she has learned regarding developing Internet Home Based Businesses. Find out how to start your own business at http://www.affiliatehomepro.com

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Direct Mail Sales Letters – 10 Key Elements to Creating Marketing Pieces That Get Results

Posted on 03. Mar, 2007 by Chestin Salisbury - EzineArticles Expert Author.

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