I started putting together my photo portfolio and sketching out an official site which will represent my photography services in Tampa (as well as surrounding areas:) Domain name is picked, picture galleries are coming together and all day today I was looking for a decent site template. At first I was very excited about some of the flash templates offered by the Template Monster. Very clean and very professional looking. A bit pricey, but I was considering. However, after careful analysis (and talking to the TM support), I realized that flash based site will NOT be SEO friendly. The entire site content will be placed into a flash file (confirmed by support) and may or may not be parse’able by Google. There are talks that google bots are capable of extracting simple text from the flash files, but at this point I’m not willing to take that kind of risk.
So I decided to build a very simple, old fashioned, HTML based site. However, I still would like to have flash based photo gallery. I think they’re very effective. I looked at quite a few flash photo galleries today and couldn’t find anything I liked. I seem to be having a couple of major concerns with most of the galleries I saw today - they’re either very primitive, or too complex and not very intuitive (even for me, a software engineer). I just hope I won’t have to code it myself…..