Here are 4 reasons why:-

1) DEVELOPMENT COST – Flash development is lot more costly than standard website development. Roughly areound 100-150% more than HTML based website with Ajax / Javascripted effects. Moreover, everytime you want to update your content (even a single word), you will require a Flash developer to help you (they are usually quite well-paid and always busy!! )

2) ACCESSIBILITY – Although Flash is very common, there are still many web users (especially corportate users) who has no access to the Flash plugin. (Oh, you can say bye bye to all those iPad / iPhone users)

3) SPEED – Although most of us are now enjoying the great speed of broadband internet services, Flash sites are still relatively SLOW. You have to wait for the initials to load before you view and access the Flash site.

4) and….. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION – Why build a beautiful website when nobody can find your website on search engines?? Although Google have said they can now crawl through Flash content, it is a fact that Flash-based sites perform extremely poor in general searches. Sites built in Flas prevent access to general web spiders, hence compromising their ability to be crawled and indexed.
This is why we don’t offer Flash-based website to our Mavista clients (there are exceptions of course, for example, online game websites). We understand the need to create cool and attractive websites, but we have created many eyes-catching but yet SEO friendly websites. Check them out: Our Project Portfolios

So, it seems like I have made a sound decision judging by the travails that I have read about what is/will happen to Windows mobile experiences (and I would not use the word “premium” with their stuff). I won’t repeat them again here, but let me just say I will not be recommending any of my friends/family to buy another Windows mobile powered device (be it WM, Pink, Danger, or whatever). My recommendation as of today will be if you have money, go get an iPhone. Otherwise, get a Nokia E71, especially if you use it as a business phone.

Sidekick outage casts cloud over Microsoft

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10372525-56.html

Exclusive: Pink Danger leaks from Microsoft’s Windows Phone

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/09/exclusive_pink_danger_leaks_from_microsofts_windows_phone.html

You can take the Appleinsider article with a pinch of salt, as the general consensus is it is a bit bias against MS. However, at the same time, I would not believe all the facts are fabricated either. Go search on the web for other related info and judge it by yourself.

It was 1998 and I was on a training course at IBM learning Java. News had just came in that the US Department of Justice has brought an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft claiming anti-competitive behaviour. The class broke into a little applause as the general consensus was this would be good for choice, for some of the other “interesting” technologies to thrive such as Java (Applets), Real Player, Linux, network computers and what not (Apple was just coming out of the doldrums at that time with the return of Steve Jobs). I began following this line of news very closely.

One of the central tenet of the case was on whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows (since this practically killed off Netscape Navigator). Microsoft defended itself vigorously claiming this was merely a result of her innovation, which of led to some major debates between the two sides. The case was “won” by the Justice Department in 2001 as the judge ordered the breakup of Microsoft into two companies. The “joy” was short lived as Microsoft lodged an appeal and the decision got over turned, and case just ran out of steam and an out of court settlement was made (this, conveniently, coincided with George W Bush winning the election and it was alleged he was not keen on the case).

Hind sight is a beautiful thing, and if you have been a personal computer user for the last 10 years, do you see Microsoft as an innovator in the technology space? Consider the following:

A) IE6 came out in August 2001, and it hardly set the pulse racing as it mainly fixed many of the instabilities of IE5.x and had PARTIAL support for web standards (e.g. CSS,  DHTML, XML/DOM, …etc). IE7 was not released for another 5 years and in my opinion, only happened as a result of competition from Firefox. Where is the innovation?

B) In Sept 2002, the first version of Firefox came out (called Phoenix at that time, rising from the ashes of Netscape I guess). It introduced tabbed browsing, themes, pop up blocker, has tiny footprint, was lightening fast, stable and more secure. Subsequent versions then introduced themes, plugins and anti-phishing protection – all of this before Oct 2006. Now that’s innovation. Oh, did I mention it’s support & adherence to web standards were light years ahead as well.

C) Fast forward to today, and whenever I read about there are still tons of people using IE6 it makes me laugh and cry. Laugh at the folly and excuses about not able to upgrade (the IT department said it will break our OS setup), at the fatal nature of browser vulnerabilities that exposes the heart of the Windows, and how her own “innovation” is biting her up the backside big time. Cry at the countless hours that me and my colleagues sweat over fiddling obscure CSS directives just to make a webpage look right, and the non-standard JavaScript that breaks practically every other browser. I have used Firefox since 2002 and never did I have any trouble causing a conflict with IE or Windows after installing it.

D) The iPod is an innovation, Firefox is an innovation, the Palm Treo is an innovation, the Mac is an innovation, the iPhone is an innovation, Playstation is an innovation … can you spot the common theme – none of these came from Microsoft. It is all about embrace and extend!

Just to finish up, can you imagine what it will be like if Microsoft did get broken up into 2 companies (one selling the OS and one selling Office software) back in 2001? I will probably not have the “privilege” in using Windows ME, XP and Vista. I’ll probably be running my favourite Linux and my Mac with the latest Microsoft Office, complete with MS Project and Visio. We wouldn’t have to code websites using proprietary extensions, and programming environments such as Java, PHP, Flash and Ruby will have access to simple yet powerful APIs to manipulate office documents.

Now the thought of that brings a little smile to me when I wind down for the day …. until the next morning when I realize it had all been a dream.

I found an interesting SEO tool yesterday. It is a add-on for Mozilla Firefox which offers a collection of SEO tools for major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN (now Bing) and also the page ranking site Alexa.You can preform functions like check backlinks, indexed and domain links and on each site with just a single click.

Download Here

Here are the functions of the add-on:

The site also provides a list of free SEO resources sites. You might want to take a look!

You might have heard of robot.txt  before when you are trying to build a website or looking over a webpage’s root directory, but what exactly is this robot.txt? Robot.txt protocol, also known as the robots exclusion standard, is a file to instruct the search engine robots which pages and files to be indexed or ignored. Robot.txt can prevent disclosure  of privacy from search engines and  reduce unnecessary bandwidth load to the server. A web administrator can decide what instructions to give to the robots by filling in the robot.txt. Just like the META tags, robot.txt is not a necessary component of the webpage, but it doesn’t hurt to create one, as robot.txt will give the search engines an idea how should they treat your webpage, which might help your page ranking a bit!

Create your own Robot.txt

You can create robot.txt with any text editors, such as notepad and wordpad. There are only two fields in the text file. They are user-agent and disallow. User-agent represents the name of the spider/bot, while disallow stands for the directory or file you want to exclude from crawling. The basic format of robot.txt is as follow:

“*” is a wildcard character, If you don’t want to specify which robot to exclude, just put 「*」 after user-agent. All pages of this site will be forbidden to index.

To disallow a certain directory, fill in the directory name.

To disallow a certain bot, fill in the bot name.

To disallow multiple directories and files.

There are some non-standard extensions which is support by some major crawlers :

Allow – Allow bots to crawl on a file within a disallowed directory.

Crawl-delay directive – Number of seconds to wait between successive requests to the same server.

Sitemap – Provides the sitemap page for the crawlers.

Once the meta tags play a major role in the algorithm of the search engines. Although they are no longer the primary factor, they are still important to a website and good to have regardless, since they can give your page a unique description to the search engines. Meta tags are relevant for a successful website SEO process.

There are four valid attributes of meta elements. They are : content, name, http-equiv and scheme.”Content” provides the property of the meta information, while”Name” provides property name for the corresponding value. The”scheme” formats and interprets the property value.” Http-equiv” is used to indicate the property as a HTTP header for HTTP servers to gather informantion and respond.

The <meta> tags should always stay inside the <head> element.

Here are some common usage of the meta tags:

Name attribute:

Author – States the author of the page.

Copyright – Declare the copyright of the page.

Description – Give a brief description of the page’s contents.

Generator – The generator you used to edit the page.

Keywords – Provide page keywords for the search engines.

Meta Robots – Instructions givem to search engine robots.

index – The page should be indexed.

noindex - The page should not be indexed.

follow - The links of the page should be followed.

nofollow – The links of the page should not be followed.

all – Equivalent to index, follow.

none - Equivalent to noindex, nofollow.

noarchive – The page should not be archived.

Http-equiv attribute:

Content-type – The character set of the page. Your browser show the page in the code according to the setting.

Content-language – Declares the natural language of the page.

Expires – The page’s cache will expire after a certain period of time and need to be revisited to update.

Pragma - Forbids browsing files of the page from the cache area. The files are no longer accessible after the page is close.

Refresh – Refresh the page every certain period of time.

Set-cookie – Set cookies in the user’s web browser until it expires.

Widow-target – Prevent external sites stealing your pages as their frame pages.

Scheme attribute:

Meta scheme is used to intercept the value of the specified property of the content attribute.

]]> http://blog.mavista.com/2009/06/24/what-are-meta-tags/feed/ 0 http://blog.mavista.com/2009/06/24/50-mums-hong-kong-and-social-media/ http://blog.mavista.com/2009/06/24/50-mums-hong-kong-and-social-media/#comments Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:52:13 +0000 james http://blog.mavista.com/?p=85 We are in the midst of developing a Facebook application for a client to exploit social media as a marketing vehicle here in Hong Kong. This is the client’s first foray into new media and we are naturally very excited about the project and also very eager to see how well it will turn out given that is focussed on a local business (admittedly with an international feel to it).

Then today, when I logged onto my Facebook page, I saw something that made me cringe, but at the same time, made me felt very good (and no, I do not have self mutilation tendencies). I saw a friend who posted a link to a local baby clothing retailer, who in turn gave away a 20% discount coupon – great stuff, and the clothes do look nice! Problem is, the company got it a bit wrong on how the coupon will be delivered to the participants – it claims you just need to post the link and the company will be able to send the coupon to your Facebook mail account. I don’t think this is actually feasible, and many mums probably found out as well, so I guess one of the smart ones decide to join the page as a fan and then also proceed to leave a message on the fan page with her email (ok, may be she was told to do this, I do not know). Before you know it, many other mums followed suit and now the fan page is full of people’s email addresses – (oucch, privacy 0 hackers, cringe! cringe! )

Now, I don’t want to reveal the name of the company cos it’s a bit unethical, and I am not here to diss the company either. What interests me a great deal is to see that the rise of the social networks has really turned the tables upside down on marketing (and I am no marketing guru). This company has over 1000 fans on the Facebook company page, and it managed to garner a great response to her Facebook 20% discount campaign – that is she has managed to generate over 50 leads in about 2 hours! I think for a small retailer, this is pretty astounding. I also think the conversion rate is going to be very high, as the mums look mega keen to get the coupon.

As a side note, an interesting analysis of the 50 or so email addresses that are on the fan page reveals 32 belongs to a Yahoo Mail address of some sort! Just goes to show that Yahoo is / can still be a major player locally in targeting the 30 somethings (assuming most mum with a young child will be in this group).

Well, enough of my rant, I am going to take away 3 things from my little exercise

1. Selling online + marketing though social media is going to be awesome! Even for local businesses!!

2. Better solutions are needed to help businesses large and small to use these media properly, so I do not get to harvest the emails of 50 mothers.

3. Trying to come up with something funny to do with 50 mums but that will probably put me in a bad light so better leave it at that … and I have total respect for mums … honest.

Until next time …

1. Twitter – The rapid growing microblogging site allowing users to read and follow others’ updates. A great platform to track costumer responses and businesses trends, spread and collect information.

2. Wordpress – Wordpress is one of the best blogging community over the internet. With a strong support of users and plugins, you could easily build an advertisement blog.

3. YouTube – The world’s largest video streaming community. You could upload the company’s latest ad, start a video campaign – Anything you can think of.

4. LinkedIn – Connect with other professionals in the industry, share and ask questions. List job and seek for potential employees.

5. Facebook – The fastest growing social networking site that surpassed Myspace not long ago.  You could create a fan page for your business, advertise to targeted costumers, or perhaps create applications that might help your promotion.

6. Delicious – The most active and largest social bookmarking site. Organize and exchange useful links!

7. Wikipdeia – The famous online encyclopedia. You could setup a page to explain your business to those who are interested and research for any necessary information through the community.

8. Xing – A business networking site for you to search and build your professionals contacts through their contact manager.

9. Ning – You might want to create your own social network and keep in touch with your customers, friends, or colleagues. Ning provides the platform and allow users to create their own base of social networking.
   

10. Yes, I left out the last one out on purpose. It’s impossible to squeeze all potential social media websites on the list. You are welcomed to  recommend any new sites and share your thoughts!

]]> http://blog.mavista.com/2009/06/23/10-social-media-sites-for-businesses/feed/ 0 http://blog.mavista.com/2009/06/22/alibaba/ http://blog.mavista.com/2009/06/22/alibaba/#comments Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:18:56 +0000 Alan http://blog.mavista.com/?p=44 Alibaba is one of the biggest online business trade and retail platform site for small and medium-sized enterprises. There are two Alibaba sites aiming for different users. Alibaba.cn is a trading platform for traders within China, while Alibaba.com is an English language site specialized for international buyers looking for trades with China and other Asian manufacturing countries. The two sites operates independently , which means if a seller in China wants to promote his products to both International and China buyers, he/she have to register one account at each site and manage them separately (This review will be focusing on Alibaba.com) .

Users will be offered a “Website” for users to show their company information and promote their products. You could list the information of your product or services on your website. Premium users can create a customized layout for the site to attract visitors. Put in mind that a product will take up to a day to approve before it is going to be listed.

The batch upload function is a user-friendly function for sellers to upload multiple products at a time using the Excel from provided by Alibaba.com. All you have to do is select the product category, fill in and upload the batch upload from and product photos.

Other than searching for product keywords directly, you could also look up for buyers or sellers through the buying/ selling leads. The lead is an ad-posting function for users to search for their targeted services, or make a trading request.

You can pay for a premium account to add additional features to your account and raise your ranking on the search list. There are currently two kinds of premium memberships: Gold Suppliers and Trust Pass. Gold suppliers are premium memberships for traders of mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, where Trust Pass is for other countries over the world. Gold Suppliers enjoy more user functions and a higher priority in the search engines, of course in return the membership fee is higher.

It was recently announced that Alibaba will discontinue Trust Pass membership starting from July to avoid discrimination between local and international users. Current Trust Pass memberships will be offered a free upgrade to Gold Suppliers membership for a year. So it might not be a bad idea for international traders to get an Trust Pass now for a free upgrade before the deadline!

Alibaba.com is a site with numerous traders and business opportunities. However, there are black sheep in every flock. Beware of scammers! Avoid trading with suspicious traders even if they are premium members. Here’s a forum post with some tips of how to avoid scammers. The official website provies a good community for discussions in different issues. Feel free to visit there and ask any questions before you make any decisions.

]]> http://blog.mavista.com/2009/06/22/alibaba/feed/ 0 http://blog.mavista.com/2009/06/19/bttradespace/ http://blog.mavista.com/2009/06/19/bttradespace/#comments Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:07:19 +0000 Alan http://blog.mavista.com/?p=25

My first task is to setup an account at BT Tradespace, a young and rapid growing business networking service dedicated to small and medium businesses, provided by the BT group.

Everything is just like your regular social networking website, you can create your personal profile for yourself and your company, join communities, but most importantly, you can create your own 「Tradespace」. It’s a platform for you to promote your business by putting up your product information. The site supports Paypal, so you could actually sell your product through your space, there will be 5% transaction fee if you have successfully make a trade.

I specially like the uploading feature of this platform. Other than posting pictures and texts, The site allows users to upload up to 10 podcasts and 10 video files to promote their products or services for free users. I think this is an excellent way to show show your future clients what they are going to get from you. There is also a simple blog function for users to report and share the recent activities of your company.

You could share information, leave messages, ask questions and expertise with members in the communities you joined, You might actually obtain some valuable business and industry tips from other entrepreneurs. You can post the companies you like to your profile and a establish a link with the company of your friends, or you might want to rank and review other businesses.

If you want to share more multimedias to promote your products, you could subscribe to their service to upgrade your account. Premium users can enjoy a lower transaction cost (3%) and free calls from costumers of UK and abroad for selected countries.

I believe for now BT Tradespace is a more preferable communicating platform for British businesses, since most companies registered there are British businesses. However, the number of international users seems to be gradually increasing. I hope someday the site could grow into a worldwide platform for businesses to exchange ideas and communicate.