Recently I’ve been looking at the websites of a loft developments around Toronto. Without exception the sites suck in far too many ways. I’m going to pick on www.westsidelofts.ca, but it is by no means alone in its sins.

I’m not going to just complain, I’m going to provide some constructive criticism.

Here are points number 1, 2, and 3 on my list of how to not break your website don’t use Flash . Now I’m going to backpedal a little, and say that there are times when Flash can be a useful tool. However, creating a simple image and text based website is not one of those times, that’s what HTML is for.

OK, so that’s my ugly anti-Flash zealotry laid out. But why, what’s my problem? Well here one important problem:

Google hates Flash as much as I do - you simply can’t afford to have your site ignored by Google, but by using Flash that’s exactly what you’re going to get. Long story short, the text in a Flash based site is not readable by computers, so Google has no way of telling what your site is about, which means you don’t exist.

Here’s an example if you search for “west side lofts” on Google you should see www.westsidelofts.ca at number one, so far so good, and that’s because the URL contains exactly those search terms, so Google assumes the site must be relevant. But now try searching for lofts toronto, lofts toronto queen street or even west side lofts toronto and you won’t see the site come anywhere in the first several hundred results. That’s because they used flash to create the site so Google can’t read it to determine that it should be a top result for all those searches.

Now it would be possible to build a Flash site that didn’t have these problems to such an extent. But why bother, it makes much more sense to build the site in HTML, which could be equal or easily beat a Flash site in usability, attractiveness, findability and probably costs less to boot.

I’m pleased to announce that one of Hogtown Consulting’s biggest projects to date is now live. A couple of weeks ago the Eye Weekly website was re-launched, and I was proud to have a significant part in that.

The layout and visual concept of the site was the work of Tim Emery, of Visible Media, who produced a really nice looking design under incredibly tight timelines. Pretty much everything else about the development of the site was my work, from coding the templates and migrating 10,000+ archive stories to designing and implementing the workflow process used for updating the website every week.

Overall I’m really happy with the site, as always with a new website there are some niggling problems to work out and some pieces I’d have done slightly differently with the benefit of hindsight. I think it turned out really well, particularly considering the extremely tight timelines, 2 months from first meeting to live.

More importantly that what I think, it seems like the Eye Weekly team are really happy too. The main goals were to modernise the website while providing a platform for some interesting developments in the near future, and those goals have been achieved. Stay tuned for phase 1.1.

eBusiness Connection is ‘A BC-based not-for-profit e-business resource centre’. It doesn’t look like it has been updated recently, but it does contain some interesting articles. Most interesting to me was the case study section, as this type of real-world data on web success stories can be hard to find.
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