Calling the Building Inspector for Your Website

A short time ago a man I know asked me to look at his company's brand-new Website. A bargain hunter, he saw the site as a considerable investment and our conversation as an opportunity to get free advice. The site was built entirely in Flash, and with the exception of broken navigation, seemed visually appealing to his target market. To a search engine, however, his site was almost completely a blank slate.

The search engines robots (bots) that crawl through sites indexing content use that content as a significant guide to determining search results. But bots cannot index Flash. So the man's brand-new site earned an “F” when it came to search engine optimization, bad news because prospective clients who had never heard of his company were a key target.

The Google search we did together turned up all his competitors' sites on pages one and two, but in the next several pages his company did not appear at all. In short, the site was a complete disaster in its lack of ability to earn a search result and thus be noticed by a prospective client using Google or Yahoo!

Shaken, he asked me what the best solution would be. I thought back to a meeting I'd been included in years ago. We were there to look at a residential home for sale on a major artery. The question was whether the house could be converted to an office building. It would was hard to imagine it as a construction project.

Compared to real-world design and construction, consider the enormous problem organizations face in funding website development.  No contractor's licenses are issued, no plans must be approved, no zoning or building codes apply, and no inspectors visit to examine and approve the work.

The very next day after looking at this all-Flash, zero-results Website, I got an invitation to attend a conference for principals, partners and presidents - of ad agencies. You'd think that 12 years after having left the ad agency business I'd be off all mailing lists, but my email inbox contained a conference invitation, and I looked at it.

The first bullet point immediately caught my eye. The session topic: “Selling stuff you've never done before but you need to be selling.”

This approach to profitability is the major reason I closed own my ad agency on December 31, 1998 and opened NetOutcomes the next day. Back then, some ad agencies, including my own, were selling website work first and then figuring out, after the sale was inked, how, exactly, they were going to find the people needed to complete the project.

The conference promotion made me revisit the all-Flash website I'd looked at the previous day. I doubt that the website developer in this case had attended a similar conference, but it was alarming, when I visit the web developer's website to see that his company's site was a clone of his client's - it was the same Flash program with different clothes on.

Two side notes here. First, why is it that clients allow their website programming vendors to advertise themselves on their websites?  At best, that's unnecessarily generous; at worst it shows fear or ignorance. Just imagine an ad agency producing a print ad and then inserting, in down at the bottom of the ad, “This ad created by Tedlock Marketing. Call (520) 325-6900.” Like that would ever happen!

Second side note. Just to be clear, I'm not saying don't include Flash in a website. We routinely do. But never make Flash the entire website. That's a terrible mistake for many reasons, search engine optimization being just one of them.

Now, back to the man's question. What should be “done about” a Website that is 100% Flash?

I though back to the advice he'd given me years ago when we looked at that terrible house on that great piece of commercial real estate land.

I said to him, “In construction terms, scrape it.” In construction, “scrape it” means bring bulldozers and dump trucks and take everything to the dump. The end result: an empty lot.

He was silent. I added, “You can still use the design, but you'd have to rebuild it from the ground up.”

What can and should you do in the planning stage to prevent having to “scrape” a bad website? Common sense applies. Get educated, ask for more than one proposal, ask questions, require answers in plain English, check references and trust your gut instincts. Learn the language and at least a little about the “construction codes” because no government agency is going to be checking your design and construction out for you. The due diligence, every step of the way, is up to you.