Singapore Web Hosting Blog

Flash has become a “must-have” for many web design companies and corporate as well as personal web sites.

used properly, it can be cool, eye-catching, and useful to visitors. otherwise, it’s often counterproductive.

my take on this is, it can be used very well as part of your web site, for example, a flash banner, a multimedia flash presentation of your products/services, a hi-tech flavor introduction of your company, etc.

a trend i see in the past few months, flash is used as video and audio clip player. video is getting hot nowadays, it gives very personal touch, present your products in a more straightforward way, it can be like a TV commercial, very powerful selling tool. the benifit of using flash to play video or audio on web site is, visitors do not need special plugin, publishers do not have to worry about different video formats.

however, you have to think twice before making your whole web site in flash. many web sites are in fact just flash movies, which i would not recommend.

if you think about it, none of the big guys develops whole web site in flash. there must be a reason. the simplest i can think of, the web site is meant to provide useful information to visitors, not only a cool presentation. how much information can you squeeze into one flash? thousands of pages of valuable product information, guides, tips, articles… no way.

secondly, flash is not indexable by search engines. they’re trying to, but not getting there yet. there’s workaround to feed text version to search engines while displaying flash version to human visitors. although it’s totally ethical, however it’s still cloaking that search engines may not like. search engines use algorithm to rank web pages, not human editors, algorithm, til today, cannot identify the cloaking is ethical or just dirty tricks.

thirdly, flash movie often takes much longer to download, especially if whole web site is built in flash, as it will be a big file. again, there’re workarounds to make flash start playing while still being downloaded. then you need very experienced flash designer.

one last point before i finish this post, many people including myself would click on “back” button whenever they see a flash is downloading as full page, be it intro or whole web site. fair or not, you have to accept it. it’s a habit developed from the old dial-up days.

i was reading a newsletter where the the author listed most well known domain deals in the past few years:

Amount Year Domain
12,000,000 - 2006 - sex.com
7,500,000 - 1999 - business.com
5,500,000 - 2003 - casino.com
5,000,000 - 2002 - asseenontv.com
5,000,000 - 1999 - korea.com
3,500,000 - 1996 - worldwideweb.com
3,350,000 - 1999 - altavista.com
3,300,000 - 1999 - wine.com
3,000,000 - 1999 - eshow.com
3,000,000 - 1999 - loans.com
2,750,000 - 2004 - creditcards.com

good domain name costs millions.

but good short crispy domain name is hard to find nowadays. in the past, i recommended clients to always consider keyword rich domain names when short one-or-two-word domain is not available.

for example, if webhosting.com.sg is taken, and yes it’s taken long time ago, go for singaporewebhosting.com, if singaporewebhosting.com is taken, you can even consider bestsingaporewebhosting.com. you get the idea.

the reason was, keyword rich domain name is descriptive and may help search engine ranking a bit. it’s long and ugly, but the problem is, the shorter ones are taken. since you have to get a long domain, why not make it keyword rich?

now things have changed. and i’ve changed my mind.

always go for a brandable domain name. something easy to read out loud, easy to type into the address bar, easy to remember, something short.

so instead of bestsingaporewebhosting.com, get, for example, i did not check availability of domain name below, hostingstudio.com.sg, wehost.com.sg, mysghosting.com, trustedsg.com, etc. or maybe your unique company name which does not include “web” or “hosting” at all.

why? provide clients convenience and quality service, not anything else. brandable domain name is good for visitors, and in the end will be good for your business.

i just turned on comment feature of this blog yesterday.

it’s common to have comments enabled on most blogs. when i read other blogs, i find it very interesting to read comments as well. those who read blog are serious about the business. heck, you won’t read my blog if your not serious about your web site, will you? i do not post gossip, hot pictures, hot topic in town, etc. just internet stuffs. and it can be boring reading such blog unless you want to build a profitable online business.

anyway, back to topic. the comment feature was on by default when i started blogging last year. however before i found any human readers from stats, i saw tens of comment spams here. well that was fast.

spammers use software to scan all type of things they can spam, email addresses, forums, blogs, guestbooks, newsgroup, etc. then they spam you with those commonly seen spam messages nowadays, burn fat, drug, get rich quick, poker… the list goes on and on and on.

at that time, there’s not much real readers to my blog. it’s just kind of fun stuff for me, i have no plan to promote my blog. i don’t have much readers even now, but there are some coz i can see from server log file.

although i don’t really get what is web2.0, however experts say blog is part of web2.0, and one of the core spirit of web2.0 is community and interactive. so here you go. i added security code and turn comments on. your welcome to post comments.

the anti-spam plugin works fine so far, no blog spam received in last 12 hours. finger crossed.