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.

Your homepage should say one thing, well one and a half. It should what you are and why I should care, and it should say it really clearly.

Now this is a lesson it’s easy to forget (like so many of the best lessons) but I just came across a wonderful counter example that reminded me of this important wisdom. Take a look at the Advance Auto Trends Inc. homepage.

Ok, now you’ve read it, including the statement ‘People don’t want to spend time figuring out what a business does, so our home page will highlight the most important features of both our business and our web site‘. Now can tell me what AAT Inc. actually does? And did you bother going to read another page trying to figure it out and seeing if you wanted to give them some money? Nope, I thought not.

Right, I’m off to edit my homepage now.

The era of Internet communications opens up huge possibilities for small businesses that just didn’t exist in the pre-Internet days. Now, with clever use of the Internet, a tiny company can compete with the big boys without needing the money to hire a national sales team, buy high street stores or pay for billboard ads.

That’s all great, but, and it’s a big one, your potential customers know this too. They know that anyone with a little bit of time and money can make a website advertising their services. Those potential customers also know that a website does not a reliable business make, that there needs to be someone behind the website that they can do business with. This all comes down to credibility, and how specific signals given off by a website can either bolster or undermine your credibility as a business.
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This post is inspired by a blog post Less as a competitive advantage over at 37 Signals, a small but successful web application company. I use their basecamp product for project managing Hogtown work and like it a lot.

Their post is largely about how ‘less is more’ can be applied to software development, but I think there are some useful lessons here for web development. I particularly like the idea that ‘There’s already too much “moreâ€? — what we need are simple solutions to simple, common problems, not huger solutions to huger problems.’
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Right now street maps on websites are very simple things, usually just a static map with an X marking the spot of head office. We’re not quite there yet, but I think we’re going to see a lot more imaginative applications on commercial websites before too long. In June this year both Google and Yahoo opened their mapping systems to outside users, for free.
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How do you go about choosing a web designer? Judging by the number of results from a Google search for the phrase “choosing a web designer” (4,220) this is a common question. Here are some thoughts and links on the subject.
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