A New Wave of Communications?

This morning I created Flash Central, a blog for all the staff here at The Flash Centre.
Hopefully this will give you, the customer, an insight into the lives of the people behind the company, especially if you've never visited one of our shops.

iFramed by Amazon

We're always being asked to recommend books on lighting, digital photography, photoshop, colour management.... so we're going to add a page with a few Amazon affiliate links to books we've read and can recommend.
The trouble is, our content management system doesn't like the iframe tags that amazon use to serve their nice picture links. This means I'll have to build the page in golive and paste the code into a simple editor interface. So long as i never try to change the page using the advanced editor, it'll be fine!
I'll try and think of a more elegant solution before 'webupdate wednesday.'
If anyone has any ideas........

Killer Web Content

If you want some ideas on how to improve your website have a read of: Killer Web Content: Make the Sale, Deliver the Service, Build the Brand
I've just got to the end of it and I have to say it's been very revealing. What have I learned? Well, loads of things that, to be honest, should have been obvious (isn't that so often the case?!) here are a few:

• If your website is just an online product listing don't expect any extra sales, you're just not helping anyone!
• Always keep in mind the task your reader is trying to perform (note 'reader' cos that's what they are!) and give them the tools they need to perform it.
• It's all in the detail when it comes to search engines. If a product does a task, don't forget to put that in the text. Then when someone searches for 'great begginer lighting' on Google, your 'Elinchrom D-Lite' product page might just be in the list of results. If you only put 'Lighting starter kit' the only people who will find your page will actually be looking for spares for their kitchen fluorescent lights!

With these things in mind, you'll see some changes on The Flash Centre's website. It'll take some time but hopefully you'll notice that it's all about what you want, not what we think you want!
Let us know how we're doing.....

Out with the old....

Deleted Pocketwizard Plus Kit from site.
Added pocketwizard to products/lighting/triggering systems.
Added "UK Mainland" to delivery options to clarify for overseas customers.

We get quite a few overseas orders, which we have to get custom shipping quotes for so we can't show a price on the web checkout, we're still looking for the best way of helping these customers with the minimum of hassle.

First Blogger Post

I love iWeb, it's a very easy to use app with simple drag and drop content placement. However Google simply refuses to index any of the pages i've put up.
So I've jumped ship and from now on I shall be bloggering. It'll be interesting to see how quickly this gets indexed.......