Second Thots

I've been exploring tools to use in order to upgrade my current humble website. By far and away the most impressive has been the offering on display over at Wix.com. They provide an easy-to-use and intuitively effective interface with which to drag-and-drop all the elements needed for a modern Web page: headers, titles, text boxes, colours, shading, and so on. The result can look great, too.

There's one problem with it, though. Wix.com makes Flash-only websites. As great as they are visually, and as fun as they are to create and play around with, flash-only websites possess two major flaws. Their text is not easily picked up by search engines, thus not making them very SEO (search engine optimization) friendly. Flash-only websites can also be somewhat of a technical challenge for readers in that loading times can be lengthy, and sometimes a computer's Flash player isn't installed properly. Ever get a blank screen trying to watch a YouTube video?

In fact, I was well on my way to creating a beautiful looking home page for myself when it started to dawn on me that these drawbacks to flash-only sites are something that might result in lost business. So, as enticing as it is to create a really cool looking website with Wix.com, I guess I'll just have to wait until they either come with more html options, or until Flash becomes more accessible to potential readers and/or customers.

In the meantime, I have to say that I really haven't been much impressed by anything else on offer for amateur Web designers. Other online website building tools tend not to be nearly as easy-to-use and intuitive as Wix.com. Downloadable software tends to be a bit difficult to use for those that aren't advanced Web designers. So, I guess I'll just have to keep looking around and "try-and-error" my way through a solution, and hope that the kind of ingenuity found with Flash-only websites like Wix can also be found elsewhere.

UPDATE: Just as an example of what I'm talking about, I went to the Wix.com website to see if I could use an image of theirs to include in this blog post. Flash doesn't allow it. I'd have to do a screen capture and cut out an image with an editor myself, which is a bit of a pain to do. Again, Flash provides some technical challenges to readers that html doesn't.