|
Posted by David E. Ross on February 5, 2007, 12:50 pm
Please log in for more thread options
emailus@knowles.net.au wrote:
> I am webmaster for the domain <www.alpha1.org.au>.
>
> Not being an expert in html, I take advantage of my domain
> Registrant's web building tool, 'Instant Website'. This tool is
> provided as part of the fee I pay for web hosting.
>
> 'Instant Website' provides the option of having your opening page as a
> Flash Page, which you'll see if you visit <www.alpha1.org.au>. Well,
> you'll see it if you visit from a Windows machine. For some reason,
> when I use a Mac, my browser (both Safari and Firefox) tells me that I
> don't have the required Macromedia Flash Plugin, despite me having
> installed it. (As an aside, if anyone has a solution for this little
> mystery I'd be happy to hear it). So if you're a Mac user, to see the
> Flash Page, go to URL <www.alpha1.org.au/flashpage.html>.
>
> Having submitted the domain <www.alpha1.org.au> to major search
> engines some time back, such as Google and Yahoo!, and having
> confirmed that these search engine's web crawlers had in fact indexed
> the domain, I tried searching on some obvious search terms, eg.
> Alpha-1 Association Australia. The search results displayed do not
> seem to include <www.alpha1.org.au>.
>
> I think I've figured out that this has something to do with the
> opening page being the Flash page, and this opening page does not
> contain a link to the rest of the site's pages. In terms of the Flash
> page at least, Instant Website is very restrictive with what can be
> included on this Flash page, and so the search engines' web crawlers
> are not accessing the rest of the domain's pages. I don't know if this
> is the case for sure, happy to be corrected here, but that seems a
> logical explanation to me.
>
> I could of course forget about the idea of having the opening page as
> a Flash page. But for now at least, I'd prefer to keep it.
>
> Given that I can't edit the Flash page via Instant Website, I have
> managed to figure out how to access the web site's files via an ftp
> client. And presumably, I can edit these files via an html editor (in
> the absence of any better suggestion I have 'Taco HTML Edit'), and
> then upload them via ftp. At least this is what my Registrant has
> suggested.
>
> So, my question. Can anyone suggest what I should insert into which
> page so that (i) I retain the Flash page when someone visits
> <www.alpha1.org.au>, and (ii) web crawlers are able to see beyond the
> Flash page into the bowels of the site? One of the pages that are
> amongst those that appear when I ftp the site is <flashpage.html>. I'm
> guessing this is the page which I need to edit. Would it be best to
> insert a Meta Tag (which I understand many search engines ignore?), or
> just a link to, say, URL <http://www.alpha1.org.au/home.html>, from
> which a web crawler can then access the rest of the site? One thing I
> need to bear in mind is the impact on what a visitor sees when viewing
> the Flash page. Or am I way off track with any of this thinking?
>
> Any tips appeciated.
>
> Cheers, Steven
>
The alternative of not having a instroductory Flash page is best. My
browser disables Flash presentations unless I explicitly enable a
specific presentation. I only enable those that are necessary for why I
am viewing the page; that is, I do not enable gratuitous Flash
presentations, presentations that are there only for decoration or
amusement. See my
<http://www.rossde.com/internet/Webdevelopers.html#flash> for more about
the use of Flash.
Note that your actual home page at <http://www.alpha1.org.au/home.html>
has 75 HTML errors, a result of using Instant Website.
--
David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>
I use SeaMonkey as my Web browser because I want
a browser that complies with Web standards. See
<http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/>.
| 
XML Sitemap