Rant?… yeah… its a Rant today. If you aren’t in the mood, come back later.

I just looked at 7 wonderful photographer’s portfolio sites. Fantastic images.
Well presented… no animated crap or flying and flipping and bouncing photos.
Just well presented, excellent work.

I had never heard of these guys before, and, hey, I try to stay informed. I found their links on a page that cost them money to be placed there. All of the sites were totally built in Flash.

Look. Here are the Damn FACTS!

Art Directors DO use search engines. Search Technology, Taxonomy and relevance are currently eating millions, if not Billions of dollars. Search and find IS the way the world is more and more working. Plain damn fact. Several recent surveys point this out… Clearly.

So these folks built websites that CANNOT be found. No Way… Unless they spend additional dollars, time and effort to drive customers to their website.

“Well, so and so has a flash website and she’s busy all the time…” Yeah. I hear ya.
She also has a Rep in LA, a Rep in NY, and a Rep in London.
Combine that with her 30K annual ads and workbook placements… yeah… gotcha.
If you are pulling 500K and have all the work you can handle, you can stop reading this and laugh your ass off. Good for you… seriously, I wish everyone could do as well.

Here’s a real world reality. Search Engines cannot see Flash Websites.
Google and Yahoo and MSN don’t look at Meta Tags anymore. So all they see when they get to your Flash site is a page that says, essentially… have a nice day… get the hell out.

This isn’t rocket science, alchemy or some bizarre, carefully hidden secret. It just freekin’ is. Search engines are customer centric… and advertisers, website owners and photographer’s are not their clients. Searchers are their client. They want to be relevant… being relevant to the searcher means knowing what is on the page that they are serving to the searcher. Words… that’ all they can see… words.

We used to be able to use Meta Keywords to show Google and the others what was on the page… and especially if the page had a lot of graphics on it. Combine that with the ‘alt text’ for the images and a page could at least have a fighting chance.

Gone. Got it? Gone. No more Metatags, Flash pages are holders for a movie file and search engines are not looking into movie files. (”Well, my web builder has a way where a page is actually shown to the crawlers and then they index that and…”) Bullshit. You can provide all the freekin’ alt pages you want… if VISITORS don’t see them, they fall way back in indexing. It is seen as a ‘trick’ for SEO… and Google will squash it soon… if they haven’t already. If you don’t understand that Google is annoyed by tricks, redirects, hacks and ghost pages… learn it. It’s called ‘Black Hat” and it wont last.

But photographers keep doing this shit. Going to Flash developers who have no idea how the web works (or they would create, you know… hybird sites and make them search friendly and still accomplish the design look they wanted…) Oh yeah… it can definitely be done… just don’t ask the ‘Graphic Designer’ who is now a Flash Guru about it… Ask someone who wants to help you make a site that WORKS. Designers who also want you to do well instead of winning awards for themselves… from other designers… not from photographers who increased their business because of the design.

So back to the portfolios I saw.
All of them simply designed. Perfect.
All of them uncluttered and easy to navigate. Perfect.
All of them had wonderful imagery. Perfect.

None of them had a page rank, or backward links, or any ranking at all on Google or other places that measure traffic. Oh yeah, the photographer and a few friends and clients can see it… Cause they know it is there… but someone in Las Vegas looking for a photographer who shoots large product in Columbus Ohio just ain’t gonna find it. (But, as I said… they looked good…)

In fact, they all look cool… I guess that’s all that matters in a robust economy where photographers have all the work they can handle and are just rolling in wonderful jobs. You know, like today when photographers have a lock on their field and there is simply no end to the boon in site… Yeah. Like that. You bet.

Now the kicker… All of these could have been hybrid sites.
All of them. ALL OF THEM.… All could have been done in HTML/CSS/XML and use flash to show the movie parts. The designs would have allowed that easily. There was simply no rational reason to use the Flash. (Flash does cost a lot more….hmmm…. naww, that isn’t it. Couldn’t be.)

Oh, and all of them had ’splash’ pages, or ‘covers’ or whatever the hell is they call them these days… It’s a freekin’ locked door to search engines… Didn’t your ‘Flash Guy’ tell you that? Didn’t they sit you down and tell you…

Flash Guy: “Hey… we will spend like, maybe, like 10K for this. And it will look really cool. I can use some tiny little fonts, and put, like, little grid lines behind your images… oh… and this is cool… the thumbnails will slide in from a dark area… whoa… gettin’, like goosebumps thinking about how cool this is gonna look.”
You: “What about how well it will work to expand my customer base and create new channels for growth. You know, its been a little slow so I want to show more of my lifestyle to a wider market.?
Flash Guy: “… uh, did I explain how the thumbnails will, like, slide in…?”
You: “… Yeah, ‘k… sounds great. Let’s do it.”

I had a totally Flash developer tell me once that his sites were easily searched in Google. And he was pissed cause some photographer in Phoenix ran to him to tell him that I was dissing his product- which I wasn’t by the way. So this guy calls me and threatens to sue me if I don’t place a retraction, which I did so I wouldn’t have to be a problem. Hey, Phoenix Photographer… thanks for calling me first to get where I was coming from. Really professional, dude.

Anyway, he tells me to go to Google and type something into the search cause he was gonna impress me with how their Flash websites ARE searchable. So he gives me this:
Jimmie Bobby Ray Photography - got it… hit the Search button.

There it is… right on top!!!! My God!

URL is www.jimmiebobbyrayphotography.com (don’t click it… sheesh).

Impressive. So if I, like, dial your phone number, would it connect to you? Everytime? Really?

Impressive.

Of course the damn thing will connect to you… and of course your URL when typed into Google should show up first… At least it better. Try it. If it doesn’t, LOL… you gotta much bigger problem. Call somebody who knows and cares… not your developer… he/she should have known it was an issue… if they cared.

As he was droning on I type in “food photographer new york” - the photog in question’s specialty.
Not found on first 300 listings.
“still life photographer new york”
Nope.
“french food cookbook photography’
Uh…uh.

So if I know who you are, and remember what your website is, I can find you in Google.

Impressive.

Flash is fine for showing portfolios and image pages.
Just keep this in mind… an AD cannot mark a specific image and send the link to a peer, his boss or the client… he has to send a message that says… “go to www.jimmiebobbyrayphotography.com, click on the portfolio link then go to portfolio 4… go 12 images in… that’s the one…”
Wow… you really made his life easier…

Websites should be searchable. They should be ‘bookmarkable’. They should load fast. They should be customer centric, not “you” centric. They should feature what the visitors want… no one else… not even, uh… you. They should impress clients who overwhelmingly come down on the side of ease of use, notability, no extraneous crap and ease of use… yeah… I mentioned it twice. What…? You think you’ll get a job cause of the delicate kerning on the fancy, hip font that the Flash guy insists is ‘the one’ to use cause it is so “you”? Really? You really do?

So, to me, here’s the deal. If you have a Flash web site and are crying the blues about how you aren’t getting calls from it or that it isn’t doing what was promised, sit down. You did it. You made that choice. You didn’t research it, or you didn’t want to write anything, or you thought the cool factor was all that mattered. Fine, then you got a great Flash site that you can spend a lot of money to tell people where it is… if they can find the card, or search their email… oh, wait… they’ll just Google you…

ooops….

(Before the flames start from Flash developers… dudes, I love what you do. IF you do it in ways to help the client through their specific challenges. Do it with ‘eyes wide open’ and all’s good with me. Do it from a position of not caring about the photographer’s position, and I got no use for it.)

This also comes on the heels of a photographer that I know that is struggling to get some more work. He has the talent, and a wonderful portfolio. His site is Flash and he isn’t getting a damn thing from it. I offered to help, he was on board, but apparently talked to his Flash guy who nixed the whole thing cause it would have disrupted the design. I disagree, but whatever.

So… not ‘disrupting’ the design is more important than this guy’s financial health. Got it.

Naww… I really don’t get it.

Update: This is an interesting post at A Photo Editor. Note what AD’s are looking for.