New html versions coming soon
FolioStop was initially created to deliver great-looking Flash-based websites, but Flash alone can cause serious problems with Search Engine Optimisation. Search engines are designed to read the text in the html on web pages and can’t read the contents of Flash websites, so FolioStop has for some time provided accompanying html versions of all customer sites, which allows search engines to fully index the sites in their results.
At present (25 May 2010) there is one standard html version for all FolioStop sites regardless of which layout you have chosen for your Flash site. This works very well in terms of SEO but we recognise that some customers would like their html version to look representative of their Flash site.
Consequently we are currently developing html layouts that look and functional in a very similar manner to their Flash counterparts. Of course as they are non-flash versions they won’t support Flash animation and cannot load Flash widgets, but in most other ways they will be very similar.
If a visitor without Flash goes to a FolioStop site they will automatically see the html version so there will be no inconvenient interruptions telling the visitor they need to download Flash before they can see anything.
In addition these html versions can be viewed on all mobile phones. However, we also have in our development schedule plans to release a mobile-optimised html version that makes best use of mobile screen gestures and automatically displays text at a suitable size for reading without having to zoom in, with images automatically displayed at full-screen for easy viewing.
It might also be worth mentioning here that with Flash 10.1 coming to many new smart-phones (including Blackberry and Palm, and devices running Android) in the second half of 2010, we’ll be able to deliver Flash versions of FolioStop sites that work directly on these phones and integrate neatly with the phone gestures. Watch this space.
As always these new developments will be automatically rolled out to all FolioStop customers as soon as they are released.
