New website

[Wineman]

I currently have a new website under construction. It is Flash based and I thought it worthwhile to ask you guys what you love/hate about sites? What seperates a good wedding site from a great one (or a bad one!)

The brief to the designers was to:-

1. Make it fast
2. Make it clean and slick.
3. Make it very easy to navigate.
4. Communicate effectively without lots of junk
5. Be concise in its layout so very simple to use.
6. Give appropriate information
7. Make it easy for visitors to contact me.
8. Ensure spelling and grammar is correct.

What would your stipulations be?

It will up in a first demo form later this week with completion due for the end of the month.

[davegb]

With an all-flash site, I'd just be wary of the search engines. Because, as far as I know, they won't index text within a movie, hence the only 2 things that rank you are links to you from other sites, and your domain name.

I always recommend having a non-flash page if you can incorporate sensibly, with the info about what you do etc. If you can't do that, try to ensure that your domain name has "photographer" or similar in it - if only within the URL (eg. www.wineman.co.uk/photographer). If you can't do that, I'd consider getting a second domain to point to the same site, then the search engines will use that one.

I know there has been talk on here about the usefulness of search-engine results, but hey, it can't hurt!

Good luck,
Dave.

[Wineman]

Hi Dave

Good advice. Fortunately I do have 4 other domain names pointing to my site and the price list is going to be in HTML format so people can print it out easily. We should be able to incorporate meta tags etc etc within that.

Keep the tips coming!

[davegb]

That sounds like a good plan. Meta tags aren't what they used to be, and in fact google can downgrade you if it doesn't think your tags are relevant. It would be far more important to get a fair amount of text on your "prices" page, mentioning your keywords as often as possible. I've just done a search for "liverpool wedding photographer", and the first hit says it all.....

just my 2pence worth...