Google hates high-design websites. Google needs plaintext. People hate high-design websites after they get past the wow-factor because high-design websites tend to lead with form over function, confusing people with innovations in design rather than innovations in usability. Graphic designers might be the bane of my existence as a technology strategist and an expert in SEO. PR folks aren’t the only people who don’t get Web2.0.
I spend most of my time undoing all of the mistakes that graphic designer have saddled my clients with: gorgeous sites made entirely with Flash, Shockwave, Quicktime, GIFs, JPGs, and PNGs.
If you want to develop a modern, powerful, informative, and current web resource, you need to lead with innovation, technology, usability, accessibility, and content. If you lead with design, you’re probably building a beautifully pathetic Web 1.0 web site, maybe even Web 0.0.
Abraham Harrison LLC specializes search engine optimization, Internet strategy, new marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, grassroots outreach, and online reputation management. My personal expertise is in what is known as Web 2.0.
These high-design site made of “sliced images” or “Flash blogs” are shallow sites devoid of text, architecture, copy, permalinks, meta-data, tags, categories, site maps, keywords, descriptions, or anything else.
After 15-years of surfing the web, you would think that graphic designers would learn to stop trying to bring print design to the web. There are many offenses that place graphic designers squarely in the camp of web 0.0 but the worst of which is the lack of the permanent link-to, making it impossible for bloggers, social bookmarking sites, or social networks to link direction to explicit pages on a larger site.
Many “Flash blobs” — web sites that are basically a platform for gorgeous Macromedia Flash-based websites — don’t offer ways to bookmark particular content such as the Contact page, the Directions page, or the Services page.
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