site, there’s a good chance they would be completely unable to discern the con-

tent. See Figure 1-4 as an example of a Flash website that has no meaningful

content inside the code.

Search engine hindrances: Because Flash obfuscates text inside SWF files, search

engines have no means of reading and indexing the content, because they rely on

HTML text to not only see the actual words, but also how those words are organ-

ized into a meaningful structure, like headers, paragraphs, and links.

Usability issues: Besides the load-time and accessibility hindrances, Flash introduces

other usability concerns, such as breaking the browser’s Back button and the

inability to bookmark individual pages.

Figure 1-4. While Flash websites like this one designed by Geary Interactive can often bring the wow

factor to visitors, they present numerous usability and accessibility challenges.

cde0567328d97b61f0005356e3aea2cf15

WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES

For these reasons and more, traditional HTML is usually the best route when it comes to

corporate information websites. The markup language is fundamentally designed to

handle text, and browsers are by nature built to quickly and accurately display HTML

pages. This allows the greatest number of users to access your information with the fewest

possible hindrances.

Content management systems

The goal of a content management system (CMS) is to control a site’s content—text, pic-

tures, links, ads, videos, and more—in one single application. The software runs on the

server, is tied to a database, and is written with a server-side language like PHP, ASP.NET,

Ruby on Rails, or Python. Once a user logs in, they can easily add, update, and delete con-

tent, as well as control the templates that drive the presentation of the site. There are lit-

erally hundreds of CMSs—many of them free and open source—so it is impossible to

detail them all, but here are a few mainstream examples.

WordPress

A blog is a basic example of a CMS: the author logs in, writes a post, and clicks “publish.”

WordPress embodies that simplicity, but in doing so, pigeonholes itself as blogging soft-

ware without much potential as a true CMS that the rest of the nonblogging company can

use.3 However, it is free, has a shallow learning curve, and boasts an impressive library of

plug-ins.