Are you creating websites with fireworks? Has your website been created with images and tables? Are you getting enough web traffic from your targeted keywords…? Probably not if the website has no text for search engines to read.
Search engine spiders can index and cache the text content of a website but can’t read the text in images. For this reason it is very important to have understandable text as navigation, links and content. Modern web standards require content and presentation to be separated, this is achieved using table-less mark up – HTML and CSS.
Using Fireworks as a website mock up tool is great because of the built in Javascript capabilities handy for showing a client working ideas. Another popular mock up tool is Photoshop although the latter is less object based and doesn’t have the Javascript tools built in but probably has more in it’s arsenal for visual design. That said none of these tools should be used to produce the final website – only the web page visual. Just because the option is there doesn’t mean to say you should use it! Not entirely anyway.
The option to slice out images is useful and if it makes your web design workflow quicker by all means use it. However, the web page itself should be hand coded into logical mark up that is easy to understand by search engines and quick to load in browsers. Having a complete web page made from images is not quick to load and search engines will not index keywords that are not there in the first place.
Consider the little search box that we all use in google. It holds characters that make up words, these are what are used to match keywords on a web page when the search button is hit and if a web page has those keywords as text in the content, google is more likely to put those pages in front of the searcher.
So there you have it, if you’re using Fireworks or Photoshop to create stunning websites and web pages you’re clients will probably think you’re a hero, that status will soon get down graded when they look at the stats and say “Hmm! hits this week…. Zero!”
If you are concerned that your website is not getting enough traffic or hits that lead to business, Square One would be happy to give you a free consultation and evaluate whether it could be vastly improved.
Feel free to comment below, we would love to hear your feedback on this post.