Whenever I see flashing images or text on web sites, I’m reminded of tacky, faux-cool web pages from the 1990s. Remember web page creation services like WebSpawner?

Kevin at LexBlog blogs about flash, and although I didn’t have the facts, I somehow knew it intuitively: Google hates flash. He writes:

Flash sucks for search engines, there’s just no other way to put it. Law firms and professional services firms use as much flash to do pretty things on the first page of their Web sites as just about anyone. And I assume it is not because they like to do things that suck.

Here’s the deal. Google indexes content - text it can see on a Web page. Web pages with a flash file often include little, if any, text. The result is that Google cannot tell who you are, what you do nor where you are located. That’s not good.

Flash is not good for SEO, and it’s tacky. Did I mention tacky?

I’m biased in favor of blogs as home pages on business web sites, so I asked Stone Creek Coffee marketing director, Tom Pionek, why his company chose to place the blog on the front page of the site:

Hello La Shawn,

Thank you for mentioning us in your blog and taking the time to look at our site.

Regarding the location, we decided to place the blog on the front page simply because we wanted the freshest content to be in the most visible area possible. So, we created the area on the front page to list the two latest posts and then created a link to the full blog inside the site.

I hope this helps, please let me know if you have any follow up questions.

Thanks!

Tom

Previous post: Stone Creek Coffee Roasters

Last week I wrote that blogs should be the home page of a business web site because it’s the best place for customers to find the latest information about the business.

A company called Stone Creek Coffee Roasters placed its blog on the front page. Marketing director Tom Pionek says his company uses the blog to announce events and solicit customer feedback. He added:

For us, the thing is that we’re not a very large company as compared to, say, Starbucks….and the blog lets us speak to people, our customers. It lends a real sort of hands-on feel to our company voice.

I’m going to e-mail Pionek to find out why Stone Creek Coffee decided to use a blog as the home page. Stay tuned.

The rest of the article is about blogs and customer interaction and includes quotes from a blog consultant and company employees. The big question is whether businesses can tap into the power of the blogs. The answer is yes, of course, as long as they understand the new technology and why blogs became so popular in a short span of time. The personal nature and openness of blogs are major reasons why blogs caught on so fast, and businesses must be willing to embrace these qualities.

(Hat tip: Radiant Marketing)

Fellow blog consultant, Kevin O’Keefe, is the founder of a company specializing in blogs for lawyers, also known as “blawgs.” Very clean, standards-based design.

Notice that his blog is on an internal page instead of the front page. I’m sure this model works for him, but I think the best place for a blog is the front page of a company’s web site. If you decide to add a blog, it should be the first page visitors see. Why? The value of a blog is the frequently updated content you post. Static web pages have a place, but that place is not front and center. You can include as much helpful information on your blog page as you want: e-mail addresses, street and mailing addresses, telephone numbers, etc. Nothing is sacrificed.

Static pages are useful for providing details about your employees, services, fees, and background information on your company, for example, but blogs are dynamic. Harness the power of a blog by making it your home page, the first thing clients and potential clients see.