Today during a Tweeting session, I made a comment in regards to a tweet posted by Don Giannatti @wizwow who was sharing a website development project he just completed for photographer David Ressor www.ressorphotography.com. Don much like myself is not only a photographer but comes from an ad agency background where he has worn many hats over the years, among them are those of a graphic and web designer.

Beyond our similar career paths, both Don and myself share another passion and that is our distaste for photographers using FLASH as the medium for delivering their websites. We also both think that using a CMS or Content Management system is a much better delivery system for a variety of reasons which I’ll outline in a follow up post to this one.

The website that Don built for David is an excellent example of using a Content Management System to run your site and a system like PhotoShelter to manage your online sales.

In my response, I had made a snipe about photographers using FLASH based websites and not to my surprise I received instant feedback from Twitter followers asking why I dislike FLASH so much.

Most of you who have followed the PhotographersHandbook in the past or have heard me speak online or elsewhere are painfully aware of my stance on All FLASH websites and since it’s been a while since I’ve gone on a tirade about the subject or even posted on the PhotographersHandbook.com for that matter, I felt like this was a good opportunity to do so.

Maybe, just maybe I can keep one photographer from making the dreaded mistake of developing an ALL FLASH website or change your thinking in regards to All Flash websites than I can sleep a little better tonight. Insert dramatic music here.

Below are my opinions regarding ALL FLASH websites and my opinions only, if your the owner of a FLASH based website, I understand that you paid a lot of money for it and need to feel good about your purchase. Unless you can point out specifics for why my issues are not valid then please spare me the hate mail.

Before you begin the process of developing a website you need to ask yourself the following 5 questions:

1. WHO IS MY INTENDED AUDIENCE?
Chances are most of you who are reading this blog post are probably amateur to advanced photographers either doing portrait or wedding photography and your typical end user is probably someone that may or may not be particularly internet savvy or be living on the bleeding edge of technology for that matter.

By creating a FLASH website you have already created THE number 1 Cardinal Sin, something I call “The Barrier to Entry” simply put you’ve created your site using a technology that requires your end user to have a special plug-in to view your site. Strike 1.

Yeh Yeh I know that Flash has 98% market penetration or at least that is what Adobe would like you to believe, but just be aware not everyone has the most up to date version of the flash plug-in or wants to take the time to download it just so they can view your masterpiece in all its glory. Also remember, they just might have been the client willing to pay you 10 Grand to shoot their only daughters wedding. Just Sayin’.

2. WHO AM I REALLY ENTERTAINING?
The only people that are entertained by all the animated wizardry on your website are yourself and the people you force to look at your site, sorry but sometimes the truth hurts. If someone out there can tell me specifically that they booked a photography job because the client was so impressed by the music on their site or their dancing logo, more power to you…keep on doing what your doing.

Simple fact is that not everyone is going to like your choice in music and when you have stuff bouncing around all over the screen it detracts the viewer from doing what they set out to do in the first place, which is view your photography and figure out if you’re the one they should spend their hard earned cash hiring. There are 10 million other sites far more entertaining that yours on the Internet… Trust me!

3. IS MY SITE EASY TO UPDATE
Ok, This is where it starts to get really funny.

Unless your using one of the slick services by companies such as BigFolio, BluDomain or a host of other service providers, updating your website is going to be a flat out PAIN IN THE ASS. Either you are going to get stuck buying FLASH and begin the daunting task of learning the software or your going to continually end up paying your designer to update your site. (I think this is the biggest reason designer’s like Flash sites, it gives them a recurring revenue stream).

The beauty of a website is that it is dynamic work of art constantly evolving and changing over time as you see fit, unlike it’s counterpart the printed brochure. This not only allows you to keep your site fresh, but also does wonders for SEO. If your site has been built using FLASH you’ve just done yourself a giant disservice and are going to go crazy trying to make even the simplest of changes.

4. IS MY SITE USER FRIENDLY
What I hate even more than Flash Sites themselves are Flash Sites with Mystery Navigation. If you have to explain how to use your website, then you’ve just won the FAIL 2.0 Award.

Again people want to see your photography, not follow the spinning balls to un-earth what’s behind door number 2. People, if you are going to use Flash make it easy on your viewers, give them straightforward navigation and ways to access your information.

Also remember not everybody can take advantage of your spiffy Flash website, there are folks out there with physical disabilities who rely on special browser plug-in’s to help them with their online viewing.

And Last, have you ever tried to bookmark a page on a flash based website? Yeh, good luck with that.

5. CAN PEOPLE EASILY FIND MY SITE?
While great strides have been made in optimizing FLASH for search engines, Flash flat out SUCKS when it comes to SEO. I don’t care what any web developer tells you, remember most are only going to tell you what you want to hear because all they see are dollar signs in their eyes when they know they’ve got you on the hook for a Flash site.

Flash doesn’t even come close to touching a CMS System like WordPress or Joomla when it comes to SEO. So if having people actually find your website is important to you please consider this very carefully.

With all this said. FLASH does have its place. Flash shines when it comes to developing web based applications or for using sparingly for an online photo gallery, heck I’ll even go as far as saying creating your navigation system using flash is OK. Just do yourself a favor and don’t build the whole damn thing with it.

Honestly I’m really not this bitter in real life, those who know me will attest to my easy going nature :-), the tone of this post was mainly for dramatic effect in hopes someone will find my words useful and besides you guys just asked for my opinion, I’ve been happy to oblige.

For what it’s worth.

Cris…

To continue this discussion follow me on Twitter at www.twiiter.com/crismitchell
or post in the comments below.

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Blogit Boards are a collection of actions for creating display boards with 2 – 16 openings in mere seconds. The even have support actions for allowing you to drop you logo in to keep your images completely branded with your studios logo.

Magic Blogit Boards come from ProPhotoResource.com contributor Jodi Friedman of MCP Actions. Jodi has a boatload of Photoshop actions that make can make complex tasks in Photoshop a breeze but so far my favorite is her Magic Blogit Board Actions.

I’ll be honest I’m not a huge Photoshop Action guy but I was totally impressed with the speed and ease that I could create great looking photos for delivery online either on my blog or Flickr etc… It is literally a drag and drop solution and presto you have a presentation board with several images and your logo.

Power Tip: If you are a member of Model Mayhem or any other site that only allows you a limited number of images, try using the Magic Blogit Boards to create a singe image consisting of multiple smaller images. Now you’ve just turned your 20 image account into an 80+ image account. How cool is that!

Check out the Magic Blogit Boards and all of Jodi’s other very cool actions at www.mcpactions.com.

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I was becoming increasingly frustrated with all that was out there until I stumbled upon iDrive.com. iDrive.com simply does online backup right. Their system is a breeze to use and is available for both Mac and Windows.

iDrive.com also allow you to backup multiple computers under one account, something almost all of the competitors either charge for or don’t even offer and their pricing is totally affordable. A 2gb account is free allowing you to backup, up to 2gigabytes of information, once you exceed that limitation they have a host of other plans, but the middle of the road package which is perfect for most small business and home users gives you 150 gigabytes of storage for $49.95 per year or $4.95 per month. That is a small price to pay for peace of mind in my book.

Setup and Configuration is drop dead simple.

1. Download the iDrive application
2. Install iDrive
3. Specify folders and files to backup
4. Specify Backup Times
5.DONE iDrive takes it from there

Every night at 9pm iDrive backs up my client files to my account onto the iDrive.com servers. The first time you run iDrive it does a complete backup which takes some time depending on how much data you are moving up after that it just does incremental backups based upon new or edited files and should go fairly quickly.

Another nice feature of iDrive is their web accessibility called iDrive Web Access. Simply login to your account on the iDrive website and you now have access to all your backed up files from anywhere in the world, so the next time your traveling and forgot that super important file, if it’s backed up you have instant access to it. How cool is that.

I could continue to go on and on about how cool iDrive is but I say check out the little demo below or head over to iDrive.com and get the full scoop. If you decide to sign-up for an account please do me a favor and use our affiliate banner link or click on the demo below so we get credit. It’s very rare when we stand behind a product enough to promote it so you can rest assured that iDisk is a keeper.

If you have recommendations for other cloud backup solutions please let us know in the comments we’d love to hear them and even test them out for future reviews.

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Now I was nowhere near the poster child for the public education system, so every time I see something that smacks of a report card it brings back some of that ol’ childhood anxiety. However what I found with websitegrader.com was a really useful tool for telling me exactly where my website or blogs shortcomings were.

My first spin through the site yielded me a 91/100 for photographershandbook.com, not to shabby and certainly better than I ever did in grade school. It also gave me tips on certain areas that could be improved, such as lowering the number of keywords and shortening my blog description. After making a few changes I quickly upped my score to a 94. I’ll continue to fine tune and see if I can get my grade any higher, but frankly I can live with a 94, if only i could have achieved such excellence as a kid.

Not only do you get the full report emailed to you, you can create a badge you can proudly display on your site or blog, yeah I know it’s essentially a free banner advertisement for websitegrader.com, but I’m proud of my score so I’ll display it on my site the internets equivalent to my parents refrigerator.

websitegrader.com was developed by the folks at HubSpot.com and have several other grading programs. If you jump over to Grader.com you’ll find other tools for grading your Twitter and Facebook accounts as well as Press Releases and a Personality Grader.

Grade your website or blog and post the results with links to your site in the comments, I’d love to see your site.

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There is an often-overlooked step in the blogging process that will help drive traffic to your blog. You need to notify the various blogging search engines that you have new content waiting to be indexed. There are probably at least a hundred different blogging search engines but really only a handful of them you should concern yourself with. Even if you pick the top 20-30 manually updating each of them can quickly become a pain.

I come bearing a solution.

PINGING SERVICES
There are several websites on the internet that have aggregated these search engines into a nice tidy online application that allows you to check the sites you want your blog submitted to. My favorite is pingoat.com and I’ll show you below just how easy it is to use.

There are several alternatives to pingoat.com which I’ll list as well, just find the one that works best for you and add this routine to your daily blogging habits, it only takes an extra two minutes and if it can help drive traffic to your blog it’s worth it.

WORD OF WARNING
Don’t think that if you ping the search engines more than once per day you are going to get better results, to the contrary doing so may end up getting your blog blacklisted. Once per day is plenty.

PINGOAT.COM
All the services work pretty much the same, below is a screen capture of pingoat.com. As you can see all you need to do is add your Blog Title, Blog URL and your RSS Feed (not mandatory). Once you’ve done that you select the search engines you would like to submit to by checking the box next to the name.

I typically only submit to the engines under the General section and you can easily check all by just clicking on the word General (it’s all about saving a few seconds here and there). Once your ready just select the Go Pingoat Button and your off to the races or the feed line (keeping with the goat metaphor), in seconds you’ll get a report back confirming all of the successful pings, if some were unsuccessful you can go back and check just those services and try re pinging them.

It’s just that simple! Taking this extra step will definitely pay off in the end.

OTHER SERVICES
Like I said earlier there are several services to choose from when it comes to pinging, pingoat.com just seems to work for me, your free to try others let me know what you like in the comments.

• Pingomatic.com
• autopinger.com
• pingmyblog.com
• kping.com
• feedshark.com
• pingates.com
• ping.in

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To break through the Twitter 2,000 rule you need to have 2,000 followers before you can follow more than 2,000 people, so from time to time you might find it necessary to clean house and get rid of some of your Twitter dead weight.

It can be a daunting task to go through your list and manually un-follow the people in your list that are not following you back, luckily there is a new online tool to make quick work out of removing these ingrates (just kidden of course) They may very well be nice people, probably not but I’m gonna give them the benefit of the doubt.

Enter TwitterKarma TK is a flash based web application that allows you to see all your friends and then sort them out by people who you are following but are not reciprocating. You can go through your list and check all the folks you want to ditch from your list and then click Bulk Unfollow. Whoala, GONE!

There are a few other apps out there but I’ve found that TwitterKarma seems to work the best for the price. FREE. Plus I love the big WHACK button

If you have other tips or tricks for un-following twitter followers I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

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If you are in the process of building your site for the first time or thinking about taking on the daunting task of a rebuild, this is a must watch before you write one line of code.

Visit Photoshelter.com to check out some of their affordable and robust website packages for your next site.

Photographer Websites: What Buyers Want 2009 from PhotoShelter.com on Vimeo.

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Subtle textures in white, gray and black are ok but try to stay away from crazy textures and wild colors as they will only draw your visitors eye away from your images.

Spend time looking through some of your favorite photographers websites. I know all my favorite shooters use simple design with minimal color and let their images steal the show.

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Typically, Flash based sites if not built with a huge amount of forethought can be clumsy, cumbersome, difficult to manage and virtually impossible to SEO (Search Engine Optimize). Over the years I’ve spent countless hours talking clients down from the ledge and keeping them from committing CyberSuicide.

Have I painted a bleak enough picture for you yet? If Not Click to Read On…

Having been in this industry for longer than I care to admit, I’ve tried just about every Flash Web Design tool on the market dating back to the earliest incarnation of Flash, which was called Future Splash Animator by a company called Future Wave Software, later sold to Macromedia and then Adobe where it lives on today. Some of these tools have shown great promise while others were just downright abysmal. As photographers we need to find ways to simplify our online work not add hours to our already hectic schedules.

Several companies including BigFolio, Showit Sites, BluDomain, LiveBooks and a few others offer Flash based website templates with a slick content management backend systems for making your site a little easier to manage. Though these services make your flash site more manageable, they still require some level of web savvy to manage. All require a sizable investment anywhere from $100.00 - $500.00 and up as well as some form of monthly hosting fee. Not as much as a custom developed Flash Website but enough to sting a little. The downside of all these services is you end up with a website that ends up looking like a million other photographers websites because even though you have customized some colors and settings it’s still based off the same template, not great if you are trying to set yourself apart from the rest of the pack, remember we are trying to be different.

Ok if your still with me, you are either not easily deterred or are bound and determined to use Flash for your new website! If you fall into the later camp then all hope is not lost.

I was recently introduced to a company called WIX. The folks at WIX have developed a super slick online application for creating flash based web content. Originally developed for users wanting to create flash based greeting cards as well as younger users wanting to create flash widgets for their myspace pages etc… A whole new generation of older business minded users have began to adopt WIX and have turned this drop dead simple program into a full blown website development tool.

Visit www.wix.com and literally within a few minutes you can have an entire website built by either using one of their premade templates and plugging in your content (I highly suggest against unless you need something down and dirty) or start with a blank template and add your own personal graphics, content and images. The interface is so simple and seamless it actually feels like you are working on a normal desktop application. Since it was originally developed for a younger audience the interface does seem a little bit juvenile but don’t let that turn you away from giving WIX a whirl because the power underneath the hood is all professional!

WIX offers just about everything a photographer could ever want in a website including:

• 5 different styles of Web Galleries for managing images
• Prebuilt widgets; including audio players, Google Maps, Forms and Pay Pal all accessible with the click of a button.
• Audio and Video Media players
• Scads of clipart, backgrounds, page frames and buttons for sprucing up your site

If your a designer or a photographer who needs to develop several different websites the coolest thing about WIX is that you can create as many different sites as you want from within your single account. Oh and did I mention WIX is absolutely FREE. You can host your sites on their servers for no cost to you at all, however your site will not have a personalized url and will look something like this http://www.wix.com/coastalfog/cmpm it will also have the WIX logo on your site, probably not what you want if you are using this for business purposes. However each site under your account can be upgraded to 1 of 4 different packages ranging from $4.95 - $12.90 per month per site depending on your needs and requirements, once you upgrade the site you can point your domain name directly to the WIX servers and blammo your fully customized, fully manageable flash based website is now online and banner ad free.

Other features of the paid WIX plans include:

• Use of your own Domain
• Backup
• Search Engine Optimization (yep even though it’s a Flash website, the folks at WIX have found a way to have it picked up by the major search engines.)
• Google Analytics
• Premium Support

Support
Let me talk a little bit about WIX Technical support. I signed up for an account with WIX and had a little technical difficulty out of the gate, which turned out to be browser related and nothing to do with WIX, I was promptly contacted by WIX support who helped me solve all my issues. Upon telling them I was the owner of a Network of Photography sites I was personally contacted by the CEO of WIX to make sure I was adequately taken care of and have since have had conversations with other members of WIX all of whom have been super friendly and willing to take my input on their product for future development. That is what I call support! As photographers we should be giving our clients the same level of support as the folks at WIX provide their users.

I’ve talked specifically in this post about creating a full blown website using WIX, but beyond that WIX can be used to also create Mini Sites, eflyers, Video Skins, eBiz Cards and much more the only limitation is your imagination.

So in the end, I think I’ve finally found a special little corner for flash in my heart with WIX. If you are entertaining the thought of building a Flash based website I suggest you first check out WIX, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with what they have to offer and the cost at which they offer it. Since their basic offering is absolutely free you have nothing to loose.

Watch the video and see for yourself how easy it is to build a site with WIX.

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All sorts of insightful information can be obtained when viewing your website statistics including unique vs returning visitors, browser types, monitor resolutions, search terms, how visitors arrived at your site and on and on. If you haven’t spent some time looking through your server stats I encourage you to do so.

There are typically two types of server statistics you’ll use to provide you this information Server Logs and Google Analytics, there are others but these are really the only two I’d bother with.

Let me explain briefly the difference between the two.

Server Logs and Server Log Readers
Most reputable web hosting companies provide an hosting administration tool for managing your online account, I recommend finding a host that uses cPanel. cPanel gives you total control over managing every aspect of your hosting account including the ability to view your website statistics through an installed server applications like Webalizer and AWStats, both of these programs read your raw server logs and present it to you in an easy to understand manner. More information on web hosting and cpanel can be found in an earlier blog post entitled “Web 101 - Back to the Basics Part 2 Web Hosting.”

Webalizer and AWStats are both very good at deciphering server logs and will both give you valuable insight into your site traffic.

Google Analytics
Google analytics is a hosted service offered by the folks at Google that will give you all the data you ever wanted in regards to to website traffic and trends. Better than me trying to explain every single feature of the Google Analytic service, I suggest jumping over to http://www.google.com/analytics/features.html and reading through the features list, once you’ve finished this post of course.

Though beyond the scope of this post, integration of Google Analytics into your existing website is relatively easy and painless. Where Google Analytics really shines is in it’s ability to search a specific time frame and allowing you to view all your data in colorful bar graphs and pie charts which make it very easy to do month to month comparisons, reports can even be emailed in PDF format.

I’m constantly asked by clients is “How come my Webalizer and AWStats vary drastically from my Google Analytics Stats?” The answer is simple. Google Analytics does not count Spiders or Robots and AWStats and Webalizer does, period! I know your thinking to yourself I thought you said the answer was easy so what the heck is a Spider or Robot? Let me explain.

Spiders / Bots / Crawlers
Are all names for web based applications that follow links on your site with the sole intent of gathering information. There are good bots and spiders such as the googlebot that indexes your site to help you in your placement of google search rankings while bad bots are used to harvest email addresses and personal data off your website.

Bots and spiders can be instructed to not follow specific links by including a simple robots.txt text file at the root level of your server. The easiest way to create a robots.txt file is to again head on over to Google and sign up for a Webmaster Tools account https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html along with a host of great tools they also offer a robot.txt generator. Plug in your parameters and then upload the generated file to your web server via FTP and your all set to go

So if you’re wondering why your stats don’t match try placing a robots.txt file on your server and send those Robots packing.

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