[sentinels]

hey scorch, i was just wondering who you guys have designing the Jumpgate Evolution site? is it outsourced or in-house? if it's outsourced, do you mind giving the name of the company? i think one of the key things to a game is having a truly slick site to help market the game.

[alphabet]

If they design it like the auto assault site, it should be pretty cool.

[Jump]

Well, slick sites are cool but too much flash is not a good idea for any site. The current page looks cool but it is an SEO nightmare and will not enable them to get all they can out of the internet and what matters on the internet today.

[sentinels]

i wouldn't say so jump. i'm in the web dev/design industry (flash/flex dev/architect) and there are lots of methodologies for getting SEO into flash. 100% flash sites is probably not advisable, but it really depends on what type of information they want to present. slick != flashy. slick == very good usability with a great interface that's intuitive and practical. balance of form + function = great results.

[Scorch]

The site is done 100% in house. Just like with Jossh there will be a fancy version and a simple version thats just HTML to make sure it works for everyone.

[Aphelion]

And for the third party modders a data dump I hope.

[sentinels]

hey scorch, if you guys need/want some help with it, i can definitely assist. hell, i'll do it pro bono just to get it up and have it be slick so people who view it will be enticed to try the game out.

[Wild_Cujo]

Originally Posted by Jump

Well, slick sites are cool but too much flash is not a good idea for any site. The current page looks cool but it is an SEO nightmare and will not enable them to get all they can out of the internet and what matters on the internet today.

Ehh? SEO nightmare...how would you get anything into a flash app unless you use remoting which in essence bakes services. Scorch, check out the new ColdFusion release from Adobe I don't think you can find a better product for web development, its well worth the cost, not to mention its ability to integrate with Flex, not saying other things can't but CF has a layer translator, free, to take a CF object and pass it to flex as an AS object. Ok enough techno talk.

[Jump]

LOL, do you guys even know what SEO is? Search Engine Optimization. Flash is great for the human user that already knows you're there. Search engines can't read flash yet though. So if getting your site and its content delivered to potential users is important to you then you need to allow the search engines to read your content and follow your links to your internal pages. Flash menus and other "neat" toys don't allow that at this time. therefore, they can cripple the indexing of your search pages and your traffic will not reach it's potential.

[Wild_Cujo]

Originally Posted by Jump

LOL, do you guys even know what SEO is? Search Engine Optimization. Flash is great for the human user that already knows you're there. Search engines can't read flash yet though. So if getting your site and its content delivered to potential users is important to you then you need to allow the search engines to read your content and follow your links to your internal pages. Flash menus and other "neat" toys don't allow that at this time. therefore, they can cripple the ranking of your search pages and your traffic will not reach it's potential.

ohh i read SOA heh...(service oriented architecture) Its too late

[Jump]

Now see, I had no idea what that means. lol

Why do we love acronyms so much?

[sentinels]

Originally Posted by Jump

LOL, do you guys even know what SEO is? Search Engine Optimization. Flash is great for the human user that already knows you're there. Search engines can't read flash yet though. So if getting your site and its content delivered to potential users is important to you then you need to allow the search engines to read your content and follow your links to your internal pages. Flash menus and other "neat" toys don't allow that at this time. therefore, they can cripple the indexed of your search pages and your traffic will not reach it's potential.

i beg to differ. i've been in this industry a long time now and have worked extensively with SEO & flash integration. here are some examples/explanations:

How to SEO Flash, with Flash SEO Examples - Jonathan Hochman
Google SEO and Flash
Yahoo! 360° - That Girl From Marketing - Transference Metric... Campaign Innovation... Web Measurement Lacking... Flash SEO & SEO Masochist


even some of those articles are outdated and things have come a loooong way since flash first came out. and with market/version penetration growing more and more each day, it'll end up being the engines who will have to alter their algorithms to take into account all of the flash sites. adobe is also going to open-source their entire flash libraries/binaries. this only bodes well for the entire flash dev community as well as web dev in general.


and for WC: remoting is good for other uses besides applications. if you need a whole lot of data packaged up and serialized for your flash UI/frontend, then it's definitely better than using XML/SOAP. for a flash site that has mostly static content, remoting may be overkill however. coupled with the fact that CF licenses are quite expensive. if i were to go with remoting, i'd rather use another AMF-based protocol that's open-source such as OpenAMF, AMFPHP or Flourine (for .NET). i do admit, though, that SOA's are the wave of the future if you're building a nice RIA.