Posted by SpaceGirl on 10/08/07 21:02

Mark Goodge wrote:
> On Mon, 08 Oct 2007 09:26:21 -0700, Travis Newbury put finger to
> keyboard and typed:
>
>> On Oct 8, 10:56 am, "Jonathan N. Little" <lws4...@centralva.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Yes the deziner does not have ultimate control of the styling as with
>>> flash, but then a potential customer doesn't have to be driving away
>>> because of some poor design decisions made by the said deziner!
>> And as time goes on, if that seems to be a problem with this site,
>> and they start losing money because of the designer, they will either
>> have to change or go out of business. I seriously doubt either will
>> happen.
>
> "This site" being http://www.mortgagenews2.com, for the benefit of
> anyone jumping into the thread at this point.
>
> Anyway, let's see how popular it is using some common freely-available
> metrics:
>
> Google Pagerank: 0
> Compete Rank: no data
> Alexa Rank: 1,697,203
> Netcraft ranking: 5,098,230
>
> Those figures are crap. A personal website might be that low; any
> commercial site getting that little traffic is virtually dead.
> However, that may not matter much if the income stream is good.
>
> To see what they're charging for advertising, I registered with the
> site. That was a bit of a problem in itself: despite the fact that I
> have a UK keyboard their interface is mapping the keypresses directly
> to a US key map and hence when I typed certain characters on my
> keyboard something different showed up on the screen.

That's kinda weird... Flash doesn't contain any language stuff. I think
your machine is buggered, or they really have done something funky
inside that SWF (it's not default behavior).


I agree with the rest of your comments though, but it's not the way
ranking works. It's a combination of inbound links + content. Get enough
inbound links, make sure the content is published as an alternative
stream (RSS, or an alternative metatag), or provide a text version of
the content on the side. Remember earlier I was talking about Flash just
being one UI of many applicable to site - well these guys got that wrong
in this case.

> Incidentally, if you click on any of the news stories on the front
> page of that site, what happens is that it opens another website
> framed within its own Flash framework. That's usually prohibited by
> most website Ts&Cs, and has been held to be a breach of copyright in
> previous lawsuits. I wonder if the site's operators have considered
> that? Maybe that's why they're happy with an inaccessible design and
> low visitor numbers - trying to sneak below the radar of the sites
> they're ripping off.

Grey area, but I do sort of agree. It's pretty bad practice -- and
wouldn't work in any of MY sites... I have breakout code in all my sites
to prevent anything we work on being re-framed by a 3rd party.


--

x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

http://www.northleithmill.com

-.-

Kammy has a new home: http://www.bitesizedjapan.com

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