New website up

[Jason Jenkins]

Thanks Nick. I designed the site in Photoshop and had Matt Fordham from revolver creative code all the flash functionality. What you don’t know is that these “low” prices are double the rate I’ve been charging up until this year!

[Jason Jenkins]

Thanks for the feedback Steve.

[Jason Jenkins]

Thanks Todd. James Earl Jones’ agent claimed he was on vacation and would be unavailable for weeks. In desperation I VOed the spot myself and dropped the pitch down a bit. Not quite the same…

[Jason Jenkins]

Thanks so much for posting, Rich. From what I’ve heard from both “sides”, the reasons for having a rate sheet online seem better than the reasons for not. I really appreciate and value having all this feedback from professionals I respect.

[Brendan Coots]

There’s a substantial amount of feedback here on the content, pretty much all of which I agree with. It really is a great design and feel. On the technical side, I have no clue what your experience level is with web design, if you created the site yourself or hired someone etc. but I have a few thoughts.

1. Having an all-Flash site is cool, but not ideal for getting new business. Your web site can be a powerful lead generation tool but only if those leads can actually find your site. Search engines won’t index your site properly when it’s purely Flash, and has no actual text rich with keywords like “video production” etc. I know the big studios and agencies have all-Flash sites, but that’s because they are known brands, so they have little need to show up in search results. Which they don’t – do some test Google searches and see who comes up on top. YOUR competitors.

2. While most of the free world has Flash installed, there is one crucial group that often doesn’t – Corporate users. Many IT depts. strictly lock off their employee’s ability to install programs, especially things like Flash that are arguably only useful for entertainment AKA wasting the company’s money. IN ADDITION, since you are using the Javascript method of calling your Flash document (which is definitely the correct way) you are also losing everyone who has javascript disabled. Again, IT depts can be heavy handed in this regard, because it limits the number of viruses and other nasty crashes etc. they have to clean up. So while this group may be a small percentage of web users overall, in this B2B industry they make up a potentially huge portion of your target market.

3. Your site has no META tags aside from the Title tag. Even worse, since the site is all Flash it is basically just one single HTML page and that’s it. This means that, to the search engines, the only text available from your entire site is the single line of text in your title – “Flowmotion Media | Seattle WA | Video Production.” This is so little information that you won’t ever show up for searches outside of the words “flowmotion media” and even then only because that’s the URL of the site (www.flowmotionmedia.com) so you get a little boost there.

4. Since you have no “Description” META tag, a Google search for Flowmotion Media returned your site, but the description just says “setstats.” That’s a little odd to say the least, and may turn off potential visitors especially when all the other listings next to yours have full, clear descriptions.

So what the hell am I driving at here? While you can’t be expected to abandon that beautiful Flash site to solve these issues, there are some things you could do. This should include putting in good Title and Description META tags no matter what. Going a step further, you would benefit greatly from creating a second version of the site that is purely HTML and uses individual pages for each section with real text. By simply adding an html link to this second version at the bottom of your current home page, people without Flash have somewhere to go and Search Engines have information to crawl through.

Just my 2cents.

Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

[Jason Jenkins]

Brendan,

Your technical review is much appreciated and is worth far more than 2 cents. While I designed the site in Photoshop, I had someone else do the Flash development. He is waiting for me to provide him with a description and keywords so he can add in those Meta tags. After reading your post, I won’t put it off any longer! I’ll also discuss with him the possibility of an html version. Thanks for your clear and concise post. It was most helpful.