Tatu is excited to announce that Chefs for Humanity has won another award for design and useability!
We’ve been awarded a “Standard of Excellence” in the Non-Profit category from the Web Marketing Association for 2006.

We’re proud ofthe site and the cause it supports. Way to go team!

Announcing the new release of the Hess Collection website. The Hess Collection produces wonderful wines, houses an outstanding art gallery, and now they have a website that truly reflects the vineyards, the wine and the art. Take a moment and visit the site, we’d love to hear your feedback. http://www.hesscollection.com.

This was such a great use of Captivate (or maybe Camtasia) and then editing the file with Flash. Fun. Silly, silly fun.
http://siyah.net/ani.html

Not me. No siree, there’s lots of ways your beautiful shiny Flash site can get indexed by the search engines. Even if it’s all in Flash and you don’t have meta tags.

I know, I know, the anti-flash mafia says different, but they’re wrong. They are not up with the times. We are. That’s why we use Flash. (OK, it’s not the only reason but you don’t want me to go off on that rant tangent now do ya?)

In fact, the content in your Flash swf file may actually get you better site promotion than those metatags you’ve been carefully grooming.

See, it turns out that search engines these days pretty much skip the beloved metatags and go straight to the meat of your website. That part of the site’s text needs to be laden with juicy keywords that reflect your business and the vision you want the world to have of it.

But Flash has no text you say? True, there’s no text when you view the source code, but Google indexes the text inside Flash just fine, thank you very much.

Want to see what that looks like? Macromedia offers us the SEO SDK, which helps extract the content of the Flash file and converts it to HTML so you can see, effectively, what the search engines will see and tweak your content appropriately to get your message across.

That does mean, of course, that the text you use in your Flash piece needs to be laden with the appropriate keywords, just as your HTML pages do. You can’t slack off and just have pretty pictures, not if you want anybody to find you.

Interestingly, static text in a swf file yields less instances of the keyword used than do animations. Animated text is rendered multiple times and so is your keyword. It still needs to be relevant mind you. Google says spam is spam and if you use a keyword multiple times for no good reason you could get labeled a spammer. You don’t want that. Trust me. Rumors abound of sites being bounced from Google after beingreported as spam. Tweens by the way, (i.e. when a piece of text fades in and out or re-sizes.) don’t count because you are working with symbols not text.

Another thing to think about, believe it or not, is file size. Some search engines, Google included, only index the first 100K of content, whatever it is. So if your whole site is flash and it loads in one movie, it may not all get indexed. It’s a good idea to post individual pages with less than 100K of content you want indexed. Not as easy a it seems in these days of high bandwidth, so load up the beginning of your movies with those keywords too.