Why I can’t be found on search engines? Read on…
I just got off the phone with a very forward thinking church and they have a website and realize how important Live streaming is to church growth. In our conversation we spoke of their website which I typically run a quick structure and content review while we are on the phone.
When we got off, I decided to search for their church, and realized that I only had an address and I did not get their domain name. The address was exactly 13305 Woodforest Blvd. , Huston Texas, 77015. Typically, I can enter the address and find the direct organizational website in no time, but what I found while trying Google, Yahoo, and Bing was zero, nothing, nada. I only found Yellowpages maps for local communities that did not have propagated links to any site.
I could not spend anymore time looking and contacted the administrator for the domain name and found FOTN.org. After reviewing the website and having some SEO and design basics, I found that the entire site is designed and published in Flash, which means that none of the search engines can crawl or find any content that relates to the site, hence a near zero “0″ ranking.
Some Flash sites us a combination of Flash and HTML code that allows the content or text to be crawled by the major search engines and found, and eventually ranked.
Is Shopsite still the best platform? We can all agree that this answer is yes. If you have known YourHost.com management and staff for any amount of time, you know that we do not stick our heads in the sand when it comes to shopping carts and what new technology has to offer. ShopSite continues to be a steady and stable ecommerce tool .
Over the past 15 years, others systems have come and gone. Some stick, but have their challenges.
ShopSite is like the Tortoise and the Hare in its offerings and it still stands out.
YouHost.com staff is continuously getting feedback from it’s customers and from our YourHost.com internal design staff as to what we would like to see improved.
We are fully aware that ShopSite could use a short list of items and we are working with ShopSite to improve.
One of the big improvements we have seen in the past updates is templates (request a peak from tech), especially in the new release SP2 that is coming in a few weeks. Learn More…
Well, think again. I have been researching and speaking to some of the best minds and have concluded that creating a VOD or Video On Demand page that will stream on every type of smart phone will be a real challenge.
For example, as of the date of this post, the IPhone is one of the most popular phones with an ever increasing viewership, a close 2nd (depending on the demographics) to Blackberries .
The IPhone does not support flash, but will play a Quicktime video from it. Next you go to the Black Berry, on Verizon’s platform and they want 3gg video formats. Most broswers will support MP4 and the IPhone will play most but not all videos and plays best with Quicktime as a file using the Iphone’s player. As a layman, it is hard to parse out all these variables and frankly I am ok with looking at this from the clouds and it is messy on the ground. (so to speak)
I think that IPhone will have to come to the party by Summer when Flash Player 10x comes out. Steve Jobs cannot stand Adobes arrogance and their buggy Flash tool, but I do not see Apple coming up with a player of their own that will be adopted in the next year like Flash. Flash was a slow adoption, and still has people arguing over why use it and will HTML 5 take it’s place. HTML 5 does not have the adoption and you cannot monitize it like you can Flash. I just posted another article on Flash vs HTML 5.
Add to that, TMobil and other services that have different codecs and browser handling techniques…Nothing is standardized. Every phone needs some kind of player.
In a perfect phone PDA ITouch world, in theory, a company that wants to stream to all phone, one needs to to have files in many formats sitting on a server, and when that file is called, the server “sniffs or figures out what format” the phone needs and serves it up…. Most companies either straddling one side of the fence or straddling it to satisfy its viewers.
Maybe you have seen YouTube’s HTML5 demo which claiming good but is found to be be unsatisfactory and slow.
We are still in the Wild West when it comes to streaming and platform-player adoption. It is pretty messed up if you ask me.
3-5-2010 update -
I was talking with one of our partners at www.DigitalRapids.com about the IPhone and streaming challenges. The challenge is to try and serve up the video live or VOD stream and Digital Rapids has been working on this with Adobe, whom we all love.
None of the stream boxes out today will allow you to stream to an IPhone, and I use IPhone as an example because of its popularity and it’s Flash challenges. Even if the Apple opened it to Flash, there are streaming delivery challenges. Digital Rapids has come up with a box they call the “ABR” box, which uses the Adobe’s “Adaptive system” (just learned this word today) technique of streaming to the many different codecs and platforms on the market today. In one move, this streaming piece of hardware solves most of your cross-phone-platform viewing challenges.
This is a quick post will give you some insight on web design in Mobile phone.
Designing a web site’s for mobile phones are a matter of following basic layout designs without flash and 10×7 screen size you will show up pretty good. Browser coding can tell if you have an smartphone and will swap layouts so you your viewer can get the best out of the phone viewing experience.
