OK, You've Got a Web Site. Now What?
Many companies have an online presence to enhance an already well-established business. They often struggle to adapt their messaging for an online audience, and their web presence might actually hinder the image they want to project.
To avoid the same mistake, consider this:
Maintain a consistent look and feel. When customers look at your website it should be clear to them that they are 'entering' the online establishment of a business. In other words, use the same logos, fonts, colors and lingo that they encounter in your store.
Make clear what it is you provide. Don't take for granted that an online visitor will instantly understand what your company does. Assume they've never heard of you. Describe your business, list your top products and services and provide links to in-depth descriptions, an FAQ page and a page with contact information. These may seem like obvious choices but they are quite often overlooked.
Show visitors the faces behind your URL. Let your customers know all about your team, your staff or your management.
Don't let your website get stale. If your homepage still trumpets an event or a posting from 2010, a visitor will know they have just entered an online ghost town. So keep your site - both content and technology - up-to-date.
Build an online business for your offline company by making your website an obvious extension of your company and brand.
Is Flash Dead?
I get asked this question a lot. The short answer is "No!"
Let me start out by stating that “I LOVE Flash”! As a user of Flash for thirteen years, I have also been teaching students (or frustrating them - based on their perspective) for over ten years now. It's my preferred program out of the hundreds available (well a bit of an exaggeration). I've watched it grow up from being a simple web-animation tool to being the dominant video player that it is today and everything in between.
Recently Steve Jobs stated that (paraphrasing here) "Flash is dead". It made me feel like my parents were having a huge fight. You see, I also love my Mac!
Jobs' answer is to move everything to HTML5. To a certain extent, he's right. Flash has its drawbacks as it's power-hungry. It's got security issues. And the biggest issue of all is that it's proprietary.
HTML 5 is none of that. But, it's not perfect either. It's not quite there in terms of interactivity. Flash has got it beat there - easily. And as far as video goes, even though Flash requires a plug-in (it's free) and HTML5 doesn't, that does not mean that HTML5 is going to "play" your embedded video. Not even close. HTML5 is just the code that "links" the video. It’s the browser that ultimately plays it! So your browser needs to support whatever format your video is saved as. And every browser is different. Right now there are 3 formats vying for HTML5's love: Ogg, Mpeg 4 and WebM. Some browsers support one or two but not all three.
And that's only a couple of things (in case you weren't counting).
The biggest reason to not throw in the towel here is that while HTML5 shows a lot of promise, it still isn't ready for primetime. Not all browsers support all of what is defined in HTML5 and the big kicker is: HTML5 hasn't been finalized! No joke! And it won’t be signed off on for another eleven years. That’s not until 2022!
Don't get me wrong. I'll be fine with giving up Flash when the time comes, but that’s a long way off. For now, I'll just keep making sure I press "Save" every so often and try not to freak out the students who are "forced" to sit through my lectures.