Cre8tive Flow

At Cre8asiteforums, we’re still celebrating web sites whose primary goal is to give back. During our week long focus on “green marketing”, Earth day topics and willingness to let volunteers and non-profits show us their projects, we launched the Cre8green Directory.

Check it out and if you meet the criteria, contact us for inclusion. We’d love to meet you and hear about your project.

We honor you this week.

What do you tell your client when they approach you for web site search engine marketing and their entire web site is built in Flash? Do you talk to them about usability and accessibility issues? Do clients listen to your advice? If they have a Flash introduction page, do you let that slide? Are there some forms of Flash that are more flexible than others?

A Cre8asiteforums thread explores this common experience in Your Client Insists On Flash - What Do You Do?

Two weeks later and the discussion is still going strong. It contains stories, references and examples.

A thread on Semantic HTML has inspired a number of interesting questions, and spawned some interesting directions.

The thread was kicked off by Yannis, who asks

The word semantic has many different meanings for different people. Have you got your own definition and meaning? Have you got your own rules about semantics that you follow?

A great question, it’s followed by some excellent posts, which ask a number of other questions.

What is semantically rich HTML? How well does it work with SEO, with standards?

Should a logo be placed within a <h1> element on each page of your site?

Just when you think you’ve seen every kind of question asked in a forum, someone comes along with a new one. This question was fun for everybody. What Does A Normal Person Call A URL?

I’m having trouble deciding what to label the input. Should it be URL, address, web address, link?

“Normal” people, like us web folks, never did agree on just one way. The song about the “Funny Farm” is an added bonus…

I feel stupid when I see a TV ad from ASK.com about “The Algorithm”. They don’t make sense to me. So the advertising makes me feel dumb and somewhere in there should be incentive to use the search engine?

Nope. That can’t be right.

Since so many people question the logic and message behind ASK’s ad campaign, I find I’m not alone. Many of you have no idea what the hell is going on either.

Cre8asiteforums’ members are all over this, in Ask’s Bizarre Bad Taste And Weird Ad Placement

It’s always a problem trying to explain to somebody how their website is going to work, at some “later than now” state of the design. I don’t know what it is, exactly: whether it’s difficult to find the right words, too challenging for people to imagine what will happen, or whether the way that websites work is simply so foreign to some people’s way of thinking that they just don’t follow you on your way from point A to point B.

(If a web developer describes a website interaction at 50 mph, and their client understands their description at 30 mph, when will web developer and client meet at website launch “C”?)

Recently, a Cre8asite member asked about the consequences of changing their interface design. They are looking at making a transition into “Web 2.0″ and AJAX by replacing their old, outdated select inputs (or “drop-down” boxes, if you prefer) with fancy auto-suggesting text inputs.

But they’re a little bit worried. Although this seems like a logical choice, there may well be some consequences! How might a user react to a radical change in the basic functionality of a site?

What happens when you rebuild an existing website for a client and they suddenly decide to change the domain name for it? The design is different. The URL is different. In this case, even the server is different.

How do you save their old search engine indexing status? Will their rank drastically drop? Can you forward pages from the old domain to the new one…but wait, the old site no longer exists!

Visions of the Google “sandbox” dance in your head. You know you made arrangements with the host, but were they right ones? Did they understand your instructions? Does your client have any idea the hoops you’re jumping through on their behalf?