In recent times we have come a couple new project leads where we are bidding on a web development project where we were the local and more experience design shop and the competing bids were from another local development shop that outsourced the work to India (not to single them out, we have seen Vietnam & Russia).

In this situation we actually pulled our firm out of the bidding process.  We felt that it was not in our best interest to devalue our services to compete against a firm that was using talent that was under-experienced and qualified compared to our firm that has team members that hold degrees to show their commitment to their craft.  Not to say that in this fast moving web world you need a degree to produce quality work but it does help when you are looking for that quality work.

We felt if we lowered our quote to be competitive with the other firm it would actually do more harm to us and other professionals out their that work very hard to charge the rates they charge.  It is my personal opinion that I would rather support local professionals and economy than ship our money over seas just to make a profit.

My view is that you get what you pay for in these situations.  There is a place for outsourcing in the web development world but there are trade-offs you make when going that route.  Here is list of items you should think about when making the choice.

Items to consider when Outsourcing:

1. Do you need to meet face to face?

2. Do you need a designer or developer that speaks “Web Design English”?

3. Do you need someone formally trained in the fine arts for creativity?

4. Do you need to get feedback during normal business hours?

5. Are you looking to build a long term relationship with a local firm?

6. Is quality and attention to detail your biggest concern?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions then you should really consider a local (Made in America) design and development firm.  Yes, I agree you will pay more for local talent but in the end you will usually get a higher quality product in the end.  The situation were outsourcing IMHO works the best is when you know exactly what you want and you have diagrammed it to the last detail so there is not decisions that will need to be make by the outsourcing firm.

Dal

.02

It looks like this chapter is still not over.   Today I read that Legg Mason Capital Mgmnt has back Jerry Yang and the current board of directors.  This rejects Carl Ichan’s arguement that the board of directors botched the Microsoft merger talks.

Its my personal opinion that they should stay independent of Microsoft’s Live search if they are acquired either way.  Obviously some technology sharing is needed to help improve both search engines results (Live more that Yahoo).  To the public they should stay separate.   We need more choices that less in the search engine industry.

Hopefully Yahoo! in its current form can resist the massive pressure that is being put on the company and stockholders for major change that will go with its acquisition talks.

Here is a link for news on the current situation

This article was emailed to me this morning and it was a very interesting read. It talks about Microsoft using fake search spiders to generate hits on a website analytics referrer log. I would usually stay clear of rumors like this but in this case I have seen a bunch of traffic on one of my other websites from Live Search.

When I go to check the listing the supposed traffic came from I can’t seem to find the domain anywhere. This has been happening about atleast 6 months that I have noticed.  Here is some of the post on encodable.com.

“As this log snippet from VisitorLog shows, I get about 30 separate hits per day from hosts named livebot-65-55-*-*.search.live.com.  The vast majority of them are bots, not real humans, as evidenced by the fact that they have no screen resolution (and therefore no screen), which while not a guarantee of botness, is a pretty strong sign of it, especially when combined with other bot-like characteristics such as having “livebot” in the hostname.

So far this is all OK.  However, the bot’s USER_AGENT string is set to IE7/Win2003, which is bogus [the full string is: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)].  It’s clearly a bot, and possibly a spider, so it’s not a real IE7 browser; it should identify itself with an accurate user-agent string like a responsible internet citizen.”

Click Here to Read the Full Post

Well the has finally come. Flash is now SEO-friendly according to Google’s Webmaster Central blog. First off, I do not recommend anyone go out and design their new website in 100% flash and then expect to do as well or better than and text based website.

Internally at Infoscour we will be creating a flash website to rank for some search terms that are mildly competitive to see what we “can” and “cannot” do. We still believe that unless you have a Fortune 1000 brand, it will be increasingly hard to outrank websites that do major content production through website development or blogging.

With that out of the way lets look at some of the Q&A that the Google engineers put out on what this actually means and what limitations are still in place:

From the Webmaster Central Blog:

Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
A:  We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.

Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
A:  All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?
A:  At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.

Q: How does Google “see” the contents of a Flash file?
A:  We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.

Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?
A: Basically, you don’t need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).

That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a “copyright” or “loading” message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.

Q: What are the current technical limitations of Google’s ability to index Flash?
A; There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

In closing I feel this is a BIG announcement but without testing to see “how” indexable a flash site is and “how” well it performs compared to other websites, before I make a claim sayings “it’s okay and the water is warm” on flash.  We will be writing a follow-up article on this in the future after we gather some data on our tests.

Source: Google on Indexing Flash