Sonet Journal

Three weeks ago I was visiting with a client in London to reinforce our position with a contract renewal and discuss some new ideas and layouts we had for their site. The discussion turned to questions about having the client’s site rebuilt using flash. I explained to him why this was not the best way forward and if he is intent on using Flash then we can integrate small amounts that will be tasteful and stylish which he wanted. The client is an importer-exporter of fine fabrics to the fashion industry. He told me that most of the fashion industry websites are built using flash and this is the norm for that line of business. I am aware of this and having a gut feeling he may ask I was ready for it. I told him that many of the top fashion designers do not rank as well in their search engine rankings and the sites that usually come in the top positions are resellers for those very same fashion names.

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

It’s tantamount if you own a company whether it is the fashion business or any other business that you rank first for your own company name. When you have other websites such as resellers ranking ahead of you in search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN it looks bad, it cheapens the name and especially if you have no control over the resellers website and they produce a site that is aesthetically awful and unusable.
After my meeting in London I decided to venture down to Old Bond Street and the surrounding area for a look at the designer shops and stores. I went into Gucci, Prada, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Chanel, Salvatore Ferragamo, Alexander McQueen and quite a few others. On entering these shops I was duly impressed with the layout and the quality of stores. Going into Gucci with it’s door person greeting you and entering a world of glitz was everything I had expected, stylish, comfort, modern interior and the clothing and accessories laid out neatly and easy to find, the same thing with Alexander McQueen and Prada. I went into Ralph Lauren and it was like entering a warm country mansion with leather chairs, hushed tones and a warm fire. Everything in Ralph Lauren was in reach and easy to find – the staff were incredible. I had no intention of purchasing anything just looking for inspiration and a few answers. I ended purchasing a beautiful white shirt and a belt not because I felt obliged but because it was there and so inviting, easy to reach and no hassle of waiting or finding my size – this is how it is supposed to be. The same thing in Burberry I bought my daughter a scarf and the staff were awesome in their help and knowledge of what a 12 year would like.

Fashion Designer Websites

What were these shops doing right? The answer lies in well trained staff, easy to find items, style and luxury and setting a theme that is highly appropriate to the fashion label and being made to feel part of it as you enter another world.

The top fashion labels know how to sell and what their clientele expect – they know when a customer enters the store everything must be in reach and accessible – if a customer wants to see the more glitzier side they can go to fashion shows and exhibitions featuring these designers. It comes as a surprise that a majority of their websites don’t quite make the mark.
After my trip I decided to a little research on the fashion industry websites and realised they all the same thing in common – most of their sites were built in Flash, a lot of them were not ranking first for their own name, missing vital information on the sites and other numerous issues, I looked at the following:

Alexander McQueen

Gucci

Chanel

Prada

Ralph Lauren

All of them except for Ralph Lauren were built in Flash, I wondered about the visitors, who don’t have the flash plug-in, and the ones who have flash turned off, accessibility issues as well. Though the above designers rank first for their name except for Alexander McQueen who Gucci ranked first for (I believe it is now partly owned by Gucci) were not fully utilizing their websites. All had beautiful flash sites but all were not accessible and it was not easy to navigate in some circumstances. Again Ralph Lauren was the exception as it offered an entire e-commerce front but did not have any of the Glitz or feeling of their store. Gucci’s website broke in Opera browser and I had to switch to Firefox. I saw some cool looking sneakers and decided to follow the links where it then offered to take my name and address for a personal shopper to contact me. Well this works well offline, maybe, but online I didn’t have the time or inclination to go through giving my details to wait for a personal shopper. Gucci potentially missed a sale by not having their own store front.

The solution

Thinking about the best way forward – I would say that the fashion houses should start considering more modern design and functionality in the builds of their websites and offer Flash versions as an option. Treat online like their offline shops neatly laid out, well designed and easily accessible to buy with the right of amount of woven fashion fantasy into sites. Flash versions should be treated like their fashion shows as an option for the shopper/visitor who wants to see this and not forced into waiting for slow loading flash sites to open. The newer designed sites need to get to grips with lay out – nothing worse and having to feel around looking for that cool suit only to wait for the men’s flash version to open and wade through a load of photos to find what you want or possibly not find it at all.

A well designed cutting edge and appropriate website for the fashion industry that met W3C standards, search engine optimised and the information on where to but NOW would sit well with visitors to these sites.

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Related Reading
Fashion Directory
e-Commerce Web Development
Website Architecture

Anthony Parsons posted a thread at the APN SEO Forum titled Converged Technologies in response to a directory submission he received that was far from the mark in relevancy due to an individual who submitted a site built all in flash and who was claiming SEO title text for a service they clearly do not provide or have no experience with. Here is the story in a nutshell:

Converged technologies have a site built in flash they provide multimedia services such as web design and graphics as their company website claims.
They submitted to the APN Directory and entered as their key-title text the following:

Title: Flash Site Search Engine Optimization
Description: Organic search engine optimization (SEO) for Flash websites, search engine marketing (SEM), Flash site link popularity services.

The site gets reviewed by APN staff and is flagged for keyword spamming in it’s title as the company did not offer these services. As they were a paid submission APN did not ‘kick them’ from the directory and wrote them a more apt title and description and entered them to the appropriate category:

Title: Converged Technologies
Description: provide flash website design to search engine readability standards, and offer standard SEO incorporated services.

Converged Technologies got upset about this and started a dialogue with Anthony Parsons the owner of APN that soon broke down into outright abuse from a very agitated site owner.
Further to this the owner of Converged Technologies wrote and admitted in the APN forum that he was only submitting his site not for traffic or advertisement purposes but for search engine boosting with backlinks which firmly puts him in the spamming category as now ‘trying’ to rank for a key-phrase as a service he doesn’t provide.

In his own words:

Our company is listed in the most of authoritative web directories on the web with the desired anchor text (with only few exceptions) and we have never had the problem with the directory listings, EXEPT yours. I have been around the block for long enough to know, there is not much value or traffic via directories, and the biggest benefits are link popularity + anchor text which I was hoping to get.

Flash and SEO
Here is our take on this - Flash and SEO don’t mix well in a nutshell flash uses all image based text unless HTML has been integrated into the body of the flash site which Converged Technologies has failed to do.
Using flash for SEO work in a major hindrance not only to search engine rankings but also breaks all major usability guidelines. You may be now asking why have flash at all? It does indeed have its place and at Southbourne Internet we use it often in its appropriate manner. For example on client CD presentations, advertisements and integrated in small amounts into websites such as music and art sites or any of the online media’s that call for this kind of work. Occasionally we have built sites in flash mainly for the music industry where this is appropriate.

I can’t count on two hands the amount of times we have had businesses come to us that are suffering from poor search engine results due to the use of excessive flash. Search engine algorithms don’t read flash at all, its almost impossible to get a accurate reading of text that is in an image format. Think about it - you have an image and you ask a search robot to read this image accurately. Let’s say the image is of a brown dog with white patches. The search engine robot now has to look at the image and figure out what it is - near enough impossible. Imagine text as an image and what the search engine bot does with this? Maybe in the near future there will be a standard in a search engine algorithm for reading flash based text.

If you are a business and thinking of using flash on your website then use it sparingly and don’t let it be a hindrance to the main content of your site, after all if search engine positioning is what you are looking for then standard procedures in design and content should be used and if the design house knows their business well they will give you the flashy design you want with full optimisation for search engines.

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Copy Sells, Flash Doesn’t
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