The Captain’s Blog : Archive for December, 2008

Going out in the snow or in any treturous weather can be daunting for anyone. As a result I believe that a lot of people tend to stay home on such days, or at the very least they limit their travel. Limiting travel means less customers walking in your front door. That’s a little depressing I’m sure, but it doesn’t have to be.

Do you remember when you were a kid and a snow day was something to celebrate? Consider having a standing promotion that kicks in whenever it snows. Your special promotion will motivate customers to visit you and brand your business as a fun place to give their patronage to. You can make snow days a celebration again.

I saw a great example of this when lived in south west Idaho. There the temperatures would plumit as low as -30º F. No one wanted to go outside. But, a local Subway Sandwich shop made going out in the low temperatures exciting. For every degree below 0º F the Subway shop would discount that many cents off the purchase of any sandwich. When the temperature reached -30º F people could buy one sandwich at a discounted price and get another one for free.

This concept can be applied to any type of weather or business. Business can do promotions for any reason, but tying promotions to real events that everyone can relate to, like types of weather, makes the promotion feel more ligament in consumers eyes. This goes doubly for online businesses. Doing such a promotion helps to connect a website to the real world. So rain or shine you can take what seems like sour weather and make it into something sweet and profitable.

Yeah! It snowed today!

Brandon Jeppson

SEO friendly Flash, what the?! That’s right, it’s true. Historically, web developers have discouraged the use of Flash in large part because search engines haven’t been able to index it. However, technology has continued to evolve and Adobe has made Flash as viable an option to build a website as anything else.

So if you’ve been living in a cave here’s the low down on Flash. Flash is now totally indexable, that’s right it’s no longer a problem for search engines to dig through Flash and read all the content. It’s also possible to deep link with Flash, meaning you can bookmark specific pages within a Flash site, rather than only being able to bookmark the initial page. And if that’s not enough to convince you that Flash is a good option for a website it might interest you to know that Flash sites can store images in smaller file sizes than a regular .html site, which means a faster load time and happier users.

Let’s review. Content on Flash sites can be found and indexed by search engines. Specific pages in a Flash site can be bookmarked and linked to. Flash sites can load faster than traditional .html sites of the same size.

However despite all this, Flash should be used when appropriate and not just whenever possible. The point is that you no longer need to be afraid of Flash hurting your website’s traffic.

Brandon Jeppson