Flash And Javascript
Great Ways To Make A Useless Website

by
Jeff Colburn

Many of the people who come to me for a website want a site that will blow away visitors. They want lots of graphics, animation, fancy rollovers and more. There are many website designers that will gladly do this, not because it's best for their customer, but because they know how to do it and can charge more for these services. They forget that the three main goals of every website:

To achieve these goals, it's as important to know what not to do, as it is to know what to do.

Flash is often used on websites to show photographs and artwork because it's difficult to steal them. This is all well and good, but many people make their entire website out of Flash. While you may wind up with a very fancy website, no search engine can see it.

When a search engine sends a Spider or Bot to a Flash website it doesn't see anything because it can't read Flash and it assumes the site is blank. Since search engines don't list blank sites, the site will never be listed.

Having a flash presentation on a page is fine as long as you have text on the page to give the Spider something to see. It's when the entire page or site is made from Flash that you have problems.

If you already have a Flash site, your only options are to make a new website without Flash and keep both on the Internet, or have a non-Flash site and remove the Flash site. If you have a Flash and non-flash site, you should give your visitors the option of choosing which one they want to go to.

Javascript on a website can also cause problems. On my site, I hide my e-mail address in Javascript so spammers can't find it. I do this to keep the amount of spam I receive to a manageable level. I currently get about 250 spams a day, and I don't want to get any more. Using Javascript this way is fine, and won't hurt your listing with search engines at all.

The difficulty comes when you use Javascript for the links on your website. Javascript lets you do various effects when the cursor rolls over a link. On my site, the letters of my links change color. Other link effects you can make with Javascript include drop downs and fly outs.

As with Flash, search engines' Spiders can't read Javascript. When they find one of your website pages, through a link from another site, they can't follow your links to the rest of your site. So only that one page will be listed on the search engine, but the rest of your site won't be.

A common fix for this, or when using graphic links, like buttons, is to also have text links on each page. On my site, you'll see that at the bottom of each page is a list of text links, which allows Spiders to find each page of my site and list them on the search engine.

Remember, you're not designing your website for yourself, but for your visitors. If your visitors aren't happy and relaxed on your site, they will leave before reading your information or buying your products and services. No matter how fantastic your site looks, if visitors quickly leave, then the site is a failure and may as well not exist. Yes, there are many tools you can use to create a website, but remember to use the right tools for the job, and know the downfalls of each one.

Do you want to learn how to make your website work for you and not against you? Then visit The Creative Cauldron NOW to find the answers to your questions, and achieve what you want in life. Go to www.TenCommonWebMistakes.com to download the FREE report "Ten Common Mistakes Found On Websites, And How To Fix Them."

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