Once upon a time, Adobe Flash was new and exciting and Webmasters rushed to get on board this new technology for creating websites. Flash was great to create visual effects on websites so businesses to whom visual appeal was great importance such as photographers were particularly enamoured by the options that Flash provided.

The right from the start it was clear that Flash had its limitations.

Crawl ability by search engines
Search engines couldn't crawl the content properly. Adobe did allow the content to be included in the <noscript> area of the webpage but this was never viewed by search engines as being as worthy as website content that could actually seen by people and crawled by search engines.

Website size
many Flash websites are single page with all the content showing inside the one Flash movie on the home page of the website. It's very difficult to convince a search engine that you have a website at authority if it is only one page in length.

And then of course along came Apple with their iPhones and iPads which were a total disaster for Flash websites. These days one in eight people surf the net on an iPhone or iPad. Newsflash for Flash websites.

a.       Your website doesn't show it all on a iPad or iPhone.

b.      It probably totally wrecks on other smart phones.

Even with all these limitations it still quite incredible to see the number of photography websites done in Flash.  The SEOGuys we look at these and shake our heads.  Surely the web owners must know that they are sacrificing mountains of traffic by using this technology yet they seem unable to consider other options. As a side note? We see so many WEDDING photography/websites that are done with a black background. Black as the dominant colour? For a wedding site? I think that's okay if you're going to specialise in Goth wedding photography but the reality is weddings are really all about white not black.

We have both these issues with our latest client Nova Wedding photography Melbourne and after hunting around for suitable technology to use to rebuild their site we settled on WordPress into a customised wedding photography system.  Weddings photos can be loaded to the site, with a website administrator having the option to add lots of details such as location, who made the address, name of the caterer et cetera and the wedding page itself can be made public or private It is so the wedding page is either callable by search engines and visible to site visitors or requires a username and password to access.

It's early days yet but we expect to achieve a top 10 ranking on Google by September 2012 for Wedding Photographer Melbourne. So as of 26 April 2012 are on the case.

Update 1 December 2012
Position 3, for Wedding Photographer and Wedding Photography Melbourne - now for a serious tilt at position 1.