We’ve been building websites here at MARSWorks Inc. for many years and have faced many challenges. We’ve often struggled to decide whether or not we’d become more of a FLASH shop or stick to our current style which can best be described as “build anything and in any platform”. We’ve always believed in the philosophy of determining the situation our client and the web audience is in, and then determine the best possible tools and technologies to apply to that situation. Often, the choice of a platform or tool like FLASH poses many challenges in making the site truly accessible, or friendly to Search Engines, or people without the ability to download the FLASH plugin.

In the development of our latest website, a long overdue revamp of our corporate online presence at MARSWorks.com we decided to embark on the challenge of building a website that could use the rich and animated features of FLASH, but also be readable to those without FLASH and be fully readable to search engines or other indexing tools.

Although we’re only at the beginning of this process, we have finally managed to make this a reality, and in the process learn a great deal about trying to have the best of both worlds on a site. The site uses a single set of content data to populate both the xHTML and FLASH versions, and we do our best to detect the version of FLASH and then display the site in the proper format for each visitor.

What’s next? We’re next going to work on making sure we have proper support and display for various mobile platforms, including of course the iPhone from Apple and some popular Blackberry versions.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 6:35 am and is filed under Accessibility, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.