Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

If you`re an honest person, work hard and PROVE to your clients that your knowledge is worth paying for, you will become a successful web developer.  I could go on and on and on but the bottom line is your work ethics speak for themselves.  If you have a history of screwing people over you won`t succeed!  If you show people that you care, go to great lengths for them, they will most likely refer you to others.  It`s taken me 6 years to get where I am and I wouldn`t change it for the world :)

-Brent

Brent,
You`re absolutely right. Your work ethics does speak for it self. But remember, not everything that shines is gold. There are so called developers out there that don`t have the decency to give their customer`s something worth looking at.

Although, you might be able to fool you customer into believing that what he has is 100% reliable and good. But to the developer world? if a real web developer looks at your work? they will be disappointed. (I`m not talking about you, I`m just talking in general)

Some assume because they know flash they are "God`s gift to the world" The reality of it is, people are moving away from flash, and animated gifs, for the simple reason that the flash javascript that Adobe uses, the <embded> tag was never part of the html language? I`m pretty sure you know that, right? The embed tag was Netscapes way way to allow "applets" to play on web sites? you do remember applets correct?
And most of all, search engines can`t read flash. Although adobe and Google are attempting for search engines to read flash, they are still having issues, because the search bots do not read the flash content in paragraphs as a regular web site, it reads it as pure content... So, thats, that.

So here you have these so called Flash designers still using the embed tag for their content... thats funny... Alot of times Brent, a web designer will say anything to get the job, only to ruin something that was better.
It all depends how you look at the picture....
Smile.


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Edgar Monroy
Web Developer / Owner / Consultant
When starting your own business the need to "know-how" is greater than money!
http://www.nuevolution.net

Edgar,

A lot of your points are completely valid.  However, being a flash guru myself lol there are some articles from Adobe stating differently from what you are saying.

1)  Flash .swf files are searchable.... read more here
2)  Google & Yahoo have been working with Adobe to making more and more improvements for better flash indexing capabilities.
3)  Most flash developers including myself do get a bad rap because what a lot of other web developers don`t see is that flash isn`t the only language we use to develop a site.  Just because a site is completely built in flash doesn`t mean that we don`t use XML for the dynamic photo galleries and PHP for the server side.
4)  What I always do for my clients in particular is show them the data first hand.  If I`m performing seo (search engine optimization) for a client, I will show them certain keywords that they are ranking for and they always have access to our Google Analytics Data so they can see where there traffic is coming from, conversion rate, etc.
5)  It will probably be an on going war between flash developers and web developers who don`t use flash or not primarily but it`s only a war if you make it one.

In conclusion,  there are hundreds of thousands of all flash web sites out there that rank very well and I think this is one of the reasons why Google, Yahoo and Adobe have been  working on a solution for flash developers.

Thanks for reading guys,
-Brent

Brent - how about starting a new thread so that those of us with light experience with both flash and web design can see what the benefits of both are?


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Steve Mann
Internet Videographer
MannMade Digital Video
My Email