I should have written: Beware of Bullfights Ticketing Services.
I’ll be in Madrid during La feria de San Isidro so it will be the perfect occasion for me to attend to a corrida (I won’t be a part of it for those who care!). I don’t know if I’ll like that, we’ll see!
While I was trying to buy tickets from www.taquillatoros.com, I realized that the form was not secure. Second time in a couple weeks that this problem happened to me, last time story is here : Online secure reservations.
Taquilla Toros is a partner of Ticket Master so I really had to go further to understand what is going on since I was sure Ticket Master pays a lot of attention to security. Finally, they do have a valid SSL certificate but since they didn’t use HTTPS to link to the form, it wasn’t secure.
What about you? You bought a SSL certficate but do you use it properly? ; )
Marriott has launched Marriott Virtual Tour which is a new micro-marketing-website. (Sorry for this too short introduction.)
All made with Flash, it has a pretty nice look. Flash is an interesting technology for those who want to put animation on their website. On the other hand, it is not perfect. When we think in terms of search engines, it’s worth nothing else than a big zero. Search engines can’t interprete/index the texts in a Flash animation. In this case, the text is integrated in the Flash animation… and, you’re right, not indexable by search engines, you got it. Graphic design is an important part of websites but it’s not a reason to forget the good practices of web design. It would not be very hard to adapt the concept to make the text “readable” in basic HTML. The designer could have split the page, some of the parts in Flash and the text parts in HTML. As simple as that (for web designers!).
By the way, text-images are not better. On the Check In page the text in this page is an image instead of simple html. There is NO reason why it is like that.
The biggest problem caused by all this is that the website won’t be well ranked in search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN), less visitors will get to the website and the return on investment (ROI) will be less than it should/could be.
You probably know Google, Yahoo, Altavista, (we could keep on…), but how do they work and, more important, what are the main differences between all of them?
First of all, we split them in 2 categories : The crawler-based search engines and the directories.
Crawler-Based Search Engines
A crawler-based search engine crawls website, “reads” the content, stores it and, accordingly to some criterias, ranks the website. For example, Google gives importance to titles, files names, labels of links, the ranking and the number of sites that link to the website, etc. Once upon a time (depending on the frequency at which you update your site), it will “re-crawl” your site to update its database.
Human-Powered Directories
If crawler-based search engines are totally controlled by computers, robots and spiders, human-powered directories are build by humans. In this case, the website is classified in directories depending on what you request when you fill the submission form and on the editor who’s gonna had your site in the directory. Obviously, there is not much consideration about the content of the site.
Now, how can you take the maximum out of search engines? There is a lot of simple things to do. You’ll have to wait for another lesson… or contact us so we can help you directly.