This week a friend contacted me to take a look at a template that was purchased for building a photographer web site. He had purchased was a site template built in Flash. Not an HTML site with a Flash plugin, but a 100% Flash design. He wanted to know if I could advise him on how to make some changes to it.

My response was he would need the original .fla file that should be with the template that was purchased. Then he would need Adobe Flash in at minimum the version of Flash the template was built in to edit it. His site, as it is now, has very little chance of showing up in Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines for anything other than a search for the domain name, and perhaps the company name if he can get that in the Title tag. After years of trying, Google (and others) still cannot index Flash sites so they have no idea what is in the site.

Most of my clients have a need to rank high in search engines, therefor I have very little experience with Flash. Instead, I use HTML5 and AJAX to create the same stunning visual effects you can achieve with Flash. See examples listed at the bottom of this post.

My advice to my friend was if he wants to show up in searches he should build it in HTML5. If he doesn’t care about his ranking then he’s fine with Flash as long as he can afford to get it edited by a Flash developer. CMS for Flash – haven’t seen it!

One more slam on Flash and I’m done. His site is a big black blank on 2,000,000 iPads and over 50,000,000 iPhones/iPods Touches. Blackberry and Android typically only support lightweight Flash plugins. The proper way to build a pure Flash site is to provide an alternative version for mobile devices and other systems that do not support Flash.

The bottom line is the future for web design is HTML5, Flash is dying fast. Do a few Google searches on that subject.

My project for this weekend has been to convert this blog from Blogger to WordPress.  It was not as easy as I had hoped.  The import tool made such a mess of the posts that I deleted them all and manually (copy and paste) imported each post.  Took about 4 hours to rebuild 211 posts.

I managed to keep all the URL’s the same.  I even kept the .html at the end.  All the posts were by the former owner of Impulse, Jonathan, who sold the business to us in December 2009.   More about that perhaps in another post.  I was able to set the author of all his post to his name.  I hope we can do as good of a job of updating this blog as he did.  That job will most likely fall on Zach, who is much better at keeping his social media sites updated than I am.

Now that I have the posts imported and the URL’s all the same as they were before I’m running our Sitemap Generator to check for broken links, duplicate H1 tags, etc.

You’ve got a Facebook page for your company, but now you want to put a link to your Facebook page on your company website.

Not sure how to do it? Give me a call – it’s simple and inexpensive to add.

Contact Me Today!

Facebook now allows you to embed several different types of widgets onto your blog or website:

1. Profile Badge

2. Photo Badge

3. Fan Box

4. Live Stream Box

5. Page badge

Link: http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/

If you need help setting these up on your blog or website, please let me know.

I recommend the following book on getting started with Ajax:

Ajax in 10 Minutes
Sams Teach Yourself
Phil Ballard

http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-AJAX-Minutes/dp/0672328682

My only complaint is that the first half of the book does a brief overview of Javascript, HTML, CSS and PHP. I already know all of that stuff so I didn’t really need the refresher chapters but overall the sections on Ajax were very thorough. It had some good explanations and easy to follow examples that I coded for myself just to make it sink into my brain.

I recently setup a simple PHP script that allows the site admin to copy and paste embded code from YouTube into a MySQL database.

The code is pasted into a simple HTML textarea field and the user hits an ‘Upload’ button. The code is then inserted into the database using a simple MySQL UPDATE query.

Once the query runs, a simple return message is displayed saying ‘Upload Successful!’.

Check it out: http://www.aussieisland.com/

Impulse is now offering a new service in reference to social media networking. You’ve heard of them – Faceook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. We can coach you on how to set up your own account and create a personal profile. We can also provide tips and clues on how to optimize these accounts to increase your presence on the web.

Link: http://www.impulsewebdesigns.com/social+networking+media.php

I am going to start a new series on PHP programming 101. Check back often for new tutorials, ideas, facts and featured functions. If you have any suggestions or questions about anything PHP related don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

The concept of a variable is used to store information that can be used later on. PHP variables are very easy to setup and define; here is the syntax:

$nameOfVariable = Value;

where Value can be any string.

Examples:

$var = ‘Hello World’;
$data = ‘12345’;
$myString = ‘xyz’;

To print a variable out to the webpage, just use the ‘echo’ statement:

echo $var;

According to www.tizag.com, here are some important tips on variable naming conventions:

There are a few rules that you need to follow when choosing a name for your PHP variables.

PHP variables must start with a letter or underscore “_”.
PHP variables may only be comprised of alpha-numeric characters and underscores. a-z, A-Z, 0-9, or _ .
Variables with more than one word should be separated with underscores. $my_variable
Variables with more than one word can also be distinguished with capitalization. $myVariable

To be successful in today’s business and advertise your services and products, a website is number 1. Print ads are struggling because the web has become the number one source for consumers to search for the information they need.

Establish your web presence today! We have website solutions for tight budgets. Call or email today for more information.

If you are operating on a low budget and need a decent website, we can help. We have a program in place to help small business begin their web presence with a fairly inexpensive website.

– Up to 5 pages
– Static website
– Simple web design
– Hosting and email provided
– Domain registration
– Contact form
– CMS

Starting at $999.99

Call or email today for more information.