St. Louis Wedding Photography and Event Photography

I see quite a few sites that are owned by photographers or photography studios that are built in Flash.  These sites are attractive, flashy, and offer a clean presentation for displaying photos and content.  What’s more is that many of the Flash templates being used by photographers are inexpensive to purchase.  Bludomain sells very good looking designs and they start at only $200.  What is the problem with running an all-Flash site?  You are probably sacrificing your search engine rankings because your site is built only with Flash.

So why don’t most Flash sites do well in search engines?  The reason is simple and straightforward.  The engines see the site as about 50 lines of code, if that, and they can’t read most of the content in the Flash sites.  Google has been said to be able to read some content from Flash but it cannot read everything and what it can read probably won’t be indexed like a regular HTML (or another standard language such as PHP, ASP, etc) based site.

I have talked to a number of photographers recently who have been in the market for a new website.  I suggest using a site that is built on a platform that can be easily read by the search engines.  You can still add interaction and flair with Flash but just don’t put important text and content in Flash.  It won’t hurt to build the photo gallery with Flash, especially since there is very little text or relevant content in a photo gallery. 

Search Engine Roundtable discusses the idea of Flash and crawlability in their article, Search Engine Friendly Design and Coding (Especially Flash).

If you want to see what a search engine (probably) sees on your site see SEO Browser Spider Simulator or WebConfs Spider Simulator.  The reason I say this is what they probably see is because Google is going to be slightly more advanced and it may read a bit of content in a Flash file but it won’t read much or most of it.  It is also true that the engines probably can’t differentiate between pages on the site.  They might only see one site.  This is very similar to building a site in frames.

So what is the impact of all of this?

The impact of this is very straightforward.  If your site is built in Flash and your competitor’s site is built in a code that the engines can read, your competitor will probably achieve a higher ranking than your site.  This may cause you to have much less traffic than your competitor and you might lost business to competitors.

In my next post I will offer some suggestions on ways to help your position if your site is built in Flash.

I received my D300 yesterday and broke it out immediately. I ordered the MB-D10 vertical grip with it so that it would feel like the D2x as much as possible.  I figured I’d do a Nikon D300 vs D2x comparison.  I have taken a handful of shots and have some initial thoughts. The D300 live view is going to be a valuable asset. There are many times when I try to catch a shot at an obscure angle such as shooting from the ground or against a wall. I’ve never had much luck with the angles and have to take a bunch of shots to get it right. The D300’s vertical grip is solid - you wouldn’t know that there is a difference between it and the D2x except for the thumb selector. The screen on the D300 is bright and sharp. It is much better than the D2x and you can really see the difference in the quality. The D200 shoots about as fast as the D2x and the on board flash is a nice feature even though I normally use the SB-800 speedlights. One of the most noticeable differences between the D2x and the D200 is the white balance and ISO settings. The D300 gets about one to two stops better than the D2x on ISO. The white balance is very accurate on the D300. I find that I frequently have to make minor tweaks to the photos I shoot with the D2x and I think that the D300 does a much better job. The only feature that I cannot really see much of a difference on is the auto focus motor. The D300 should be faster than the D2x with auto focus but I cannot see much of a difference at all. For all my testing I used a 17-55mm f/2.8 and 70-200mm f/2.8. When I get time I’ll set up some lights and do a side by side comparison of both cameras.

Update
3-1-08

I found time to shoot a bunch of photos last night and Thursday with the D300.  So far it really performs well - much better than the D2x.  The autofocus is noticeably faster.  I did notice that when using the SB-800 with Nikon diffuser tilted at 45 degrees, the camera tended to overexpose by about 1/3rd to 2/3rds of a stop. As previously mentioned, the white balance is very good.  I shot a couple hundred photos with some 300 watt second strobes last night and I’ll post the photos later this weekend.