After having used CoffeeCup tools for several years to create single web pages and to perform website maintenance tasks, now for the first time I have used them to completely rebuild my website: www.lumacraft.com.

The previous two versions of my website were primarily flash based, and even though the immediate predecessor included a full shadow HTML version, search engine indexing of my site has always been weak. So my mail goal with this redesign was to make the site HTML based, while including Flash features where appropriate without jeopardizing SEO. The new site is only one day old, and the new sitemap will just be going out the search engines today, so it will be a little while still before I will know whether my efforts this time have succeeded.

I already have a list of small enhancements that I want to make to the new site .. I guess it never stops .. but I am happy with the results, and I am thankful to CoffeeCup for offering tools that enabled me to perform this rebuild affordably.

Hi David, and welcome to the forums.

Your site is nice looking, but as far as I can see, several pages are still just flash and no text that search bots can pick up to get an idea of the contents.

What you ought to do in order to help the search bots finding your site, is inserting meta tags such as keywords and description. But the keywords must match the contents, so you really need real text on your pages.

First time I opened your site it occurred to me that it was slow loading, which is also something you ought to look into.

Flash navigation without alternative method.

Yes, that is right, I overlooked that one. You could make a simple text navigation in the footer of the site. That is a common way of making alternative navigation to flash.

Another reason fror keeping flash at a minimum, is that the popular Ipads and Iphones, which are used quite often nowadays, are not able to display flash content.

Thanks Inger, for checking out my new site, and for posting your helpful comments and advice.

I had somehow overlooked adding descriptions and keywords to the new site's pages. I am glad that you caught that!

I have added some more HTML to each page, in the form of a common menu block, which I hope will help with search engine indexing. (This addition partly duplicates the content of the flash menus that also appear on each page. The search engine authors have been saying for years that their indexing processes are getting smarter about interpreting flash elements, XML files, and so on .. but I for one have yet to see any evidence whatsoever of this.) I know that some pages on my site, including its landing page and home page, still lack real HTML text content. The dilemma is that these pages are intended to showcase images. Do I add text for the sake of adding text, and if so, how do I do it without detracting from the visual impact of a cleanly presented sequence of images?

As for initial page loading speed, I remain in a quandary about this. As a photographer, I believe that it is absolutely vital to get plenty of my images in front of the eyes of my visitors, automatically and often. The flash slideshows that are embedded on my site are now being driven by big specialized third party service providers, and the performance improvement has been noticeable. Beyond the slideshows, I find the flash menu very appealing, and I am hoping that my visitors do too. I am not sure yet about the brief animated text segment that appears when first visiting the site; while I believe that its message is important, I don't want it to cause impatient visitors to steer their browsers elsewhere. Are there simple ways to pep up the performance of embedded flash elements like these, so that they can deliver some extra functional and visual value, without being a burden?

David

I think you have the best guitar solos in the industry, David.

Hi again,

I think it is much better to have some text on the pages. It's that text that makes the basis for the search engines.

Some other considerations:

1. In order not having the text take too much attention from the images, you could think of reducing the font size a bit (to the same size as the text of the flash menu.

2. When navigating your site, I suddenly thought I had been caught in a loop. I clicked 'Home' on the text menu, but I didn't get back to the Home of the site. I had not noticed that I had landed in a sub domain for clients. I think you ought to think very well through your navigation structure and perhaps give that clients' 'home' a different name, so that you keep just one Home page for your site.

3. You have chosen a fairly narrow page width. I don't know what monitor sizes you potential clients might have, you probably have some statistics in your cpanel at your server, but it is now quite common to have widths up to 1000px, certainly 900 and 950px. I'm saying this because your pages are fairly long, and with the links all the way at the bottom, people might be too lazy to scroll all that way. If the pages were wider, they wouldn't have to be that long.

4. I'm no flash optimizer expert, so others will have to reply to your questions about flash and page loading speed. Just make sure that the images in the flash animations, and any other images/graphics you might have on your site, are scaled down to the size you want to display using a picture editing programme, not just compressed or squashed somehow by any other types of progs.

Thank you for another series of helpful suggestions, Inger.



Again, my dilemma has been, how do I make my site texty for the sake of SEO, without diluting the impact of the slideshows that I have chosen to use as my first and most important means of communicating with my visitors? The solution that I am now attempting is to include the text, but to place it at the bottom of the page, where it should not interfere with the visual message at the top of the page.

It has been rewarding to see my Google search ranking continue to slowly climb as I have added more content to the site, more internal links and external backlinks, and various site optimizations for SEO. It is clear to me though, from carefully monitoring my site through SEO analysis tools, especially the Google webmaster console, that having my start page and ultimate home page almost devoid of text has been, if nothing else, a big opportunity missed, and more likely a significant impairment to the site's SEO performance.

Today I finally took on the task of writing my little essays and adding them to my start and home pages. I will be curious to see over the coming weeks what effect this has on my site's rankings and listings. If the results are positive, my next step will be to try taking a similar approach to some of the other pages on my site that are low in text content.

Hi again, David,

I threw a quick glance at your site since it is 30 minutes past midnight where I live, but I can take a closer look tomorrow. A while ago I wrote a reply to someone else in this thread: http://www.coffeecup.com/forums/designe … -friendly/ Maybe you can pick up something useful there.

With Visual Site Designer, you can create a navigation bar just like the flash one you have, but with images instead; the alt="" attribute of image tags should bump up your site's ranking as well as making it navigable for those without flash.