We’re going to make the differences clear so you can be more in control of your own web site.

Let’s think of your web site as a house for a few minutes.

Your house needs to be built properly, and be up to code. The foundation needs to be solid, and the roof made to withstand the forces of nature. This is similar to web development. Web development involves designing and writing the code that makes your web site work. It needs to be solid and secure, and be coded so the search engines find you.

But, four walls and a roof aren’t enough for most people. You want a house that has a layout that makes sense and is attractive. You wouldn’t want a toilet in the center of the living room or a picture window in front of your toilet. So, somebody draws up blueprints showing the layout. Somebody also chooses paint color and decor. This is similar to web design. Web design involves laying out your web site and choosing attractive appropriate visuals.

Both of these components are important to a good web site. A poorly developed web site might fail, or be insecure, or never get you good search engine rankings. A poorly designed web site will make you look unprofessional and harm your customer’s confidence in you.

This is why MetaActive places equal emphasis on both sides. We are a web design and a web development company. We’re not going to sell you on tens of thousands of dollars of social media strategy that you don’t need if your web site stinks.

Get your house in order first, then think about adding a helipad.

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Search Engine Optimization

The search engines have always had a tough time indexing Flash content. This might be getting a little bit better, but for best SEO put your content into P.O.S.H. (Plain Old Semantic HTML). The search engines have no trouble indexing this.

A web page properly coded with HTML has markers that can help search engines send you relevant traffic.

Accessibility

People who use adaptive technology, such as screen readers for the blind, can have difficulty navigating Flash applications. If the application is dependent on sound or animation, people who are hearing or visually impaired will have issues.

Mobile Platforms

While some mobile platforms (like Android phones) now have a Flash player, many more mobile devices will not be able to display Flash. When you consider that greater and greater numbers of people are accessing the web on their phones – it doesn’t makes sense to cut off potential customers.

Flash Can be Annoying

One of my pet-peeves is click on a link and super loud music, speech, or annoying sound effects automatically start playing. Another is when I’m looking for specific information about a company and I have to sit through a 3 minute movie before I can access their web site. Both of these things are good ways to lose me as a customer.

Flash is cool, and the animations can be quite slick. However, Flash doesn’t always make customer experience better.

The Right Way to Use Flash in Your Web Design

We like to think of Flash and other plugins (like Silverlight) like either a condiment or a side dish. Small animations that enhance customer experience, but don’t detract from the site when missing are fine. As a side-dish, a small flash application (like an interactive calculator) may be a good add-on.

Certain larger sites that serve video (like Youtube) have to rely on Flash to do what they do. For the most part, small businesses should stick to clean web design, developed with standard HTML.

Why?

To find out where this business was, I did what most people in the world do today, I looked at their web site. At the bottom of their web site was an address. This turned out to be not so much a physical as mailing address. They had a web page set up for directions which pointed to a non-functioning mapquest page.

Fortunately, my wife got out her smartphone, found the phone number, and got directions. The physical address was two streets away from the address we had.

So here’s our advice:

On your web site, make sure there is a very clear way for customers to do business with you.

This would be my recommendations for this company:

1. At the bottom of every web page, I would list mailing and physical addresses and phone number. For this business, mailing address is important.
2. On the directions page, write out step by step directions including landmarks from each direction people could be traveling from. Don’t rely on Mapquest or any other 3rd party to do that for you.
3. Include a map from Mapquest, Google, or Bing – but check on it regularly to make sure it’s functioning.
4. Make sure the physical business address is listed with local search and included in Google maps.

If your business doesn’t have a physical location where customers come, then make it very clear on your web site how people should get in touch with you.

Forrester research estimates that, by 2015, 45% of all web users will own a smartphone. Smartphones are those little pocket computers like the iPhone, Android, and the Blackberry. They’re getting cheaper, there’s more competition, and everyone is buying them. So, should you look forward and invest in building a mobile web site for your business?

Not necessarily.

Mobile Browsers

The browsers built into the new smartphones tend to be more technically advanced than the browsers on most desktops. Many people never upgrade their desktop browser and keep their computers around for a long time. Smartphones are frequently automatically updated by the service providers and people tend to get new phones every 2-3 years.

Sometimes it’s better just to make sure your existing web site works well on Smartphone browsers. You should work with a technically savvy web development firm (hint hint). Your web developer should be using web standard code, and ensuring that your site functionality works on mobile browsers.

Some things to keep in mind:

• Mobile browsers have small screens. Don’t use tiny text or put controls close together so that users have to zoom excessively.
• Mobile connections are mostly slower than wired connections. Web site performance is key.
• Plug-in based animations (like Flash or Sliverlight) may not work on the majority of platforms – avoid them except for progressive enhancement.
• Video and audio may load very slowly

Reasons to consider building a separate mobile web site

The main reason to consider building a mobile-specific web site is that you are building a mobile web application as a line of business. Examples might be the check-in services Gowalla or Foursquare.

Most mobile browsers allow for geolocation (getting your location using GPS or triangulation from cell towers or wireless access points). There are also a lot of web applications that use the mobile camera, or allow interaction with the phone itself. If you don’t need these features, you probably don’t need a mobile web application.