www.levelfourstorefront.com
go to the demo...

This site was developed as a flash e-commerce template site with a full admin suite built in PHP. All together it takes about 60 minutes to have fully setup for a client.

Let me know what you think. It isn't the most feature rich and is a fairly simple featured system, meant to be easy to use and install...

thanks

Josh

Doesn't building a flash-based site make it more difficult to set up ? what about custom options?

it's not a bad looking site, but why not do it in HTML, seeing as frames are kind of a no-no.

Looks okay. Demo seems well implemented. Seems usable.

You seems to have done a good job of saying what you offer and delivering an app that fits the target user. It's easy to use. And with the target user, architecture questions are less likely.

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Design Crux - infographic design,
content strategy Visual Merchandising online

Not sure if you have a redirected URL here. If so, need to have the site hosted in its own right if search engines are to do their stuff.

I see also that your doctype is "strict" but your code won't validate as strict. The frame pages have tag endings that are wrong for Doctype 4.01.
eg "/>" should simply be ">" and you cannot use "frameset" or "row" with a "strict" doctype.

On looking at the source code of actual site, there are markup errors - alt tags not specified etc.

See that it is also based on a table. It is a fairly simple design which would be better done as CSS.te.

Ian

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SEO Specialist, CSS Developers

The main reason to move away from html is the ability to offer an application feel. users can checkout without ever reloading a page. they can search categories and such without reloading even a framed out page. Once the store is loaded, everything interacts with web services, based in php/mysql. I liked the idea of not having to move through the standard 4-5 checkout pages necessary on most shopping sites.

oh, and setup for a whole store is a matter of uploading, and pointing the site to a url, so setup is as easy as any standard dynamic site probably...

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"surfing isn't just about riding down a wave, but the experience, motion, aesthetics, views, sounds, and sensations."
Level Four Storefront

I never did get a full webhost yet for this demo and such, so yes, they redirect everywhere. Not sure where everyone is getting the frameset information from the code. the demo doesn't offer any framesets, just a flash object and a background image.

but you are right ian, I probably should look at the html for this, I never even thought about really SEOing the html that the one flash file sits in. It makes it easy to do as the whole store occurs in one html file, I should spend some time doing such... thanks for the idea...

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"surfing isn't just about riding down a wave, but the experience, motion, aesthetics, views, sounds, and sensations."
Level Four Storefront

So you think we hit our target market of small business owners who are thinking of offering a small online stage of products and have trouble even turnig on their computers?

We went for extreme simplicity in both administration area and shopping experience.

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"surfing isn't just about riding down a wave, but the experience, motion, aesthetics, views, sounds, and sensations."
Level Four Storefront

The frameset in the Html code is due to the redirect. Host the site directly and you will be fine. Lots of cheap alternatives out there, so really a no brainer.

Ian

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SEO Specialist, CSS Developers

Flash takes away the ability for google to parse through the text and give the site a chance at making the first page of google, yahoo, or msn. Do your potential clientelle want to be found by prospective customers, who search, find and buy? If so they are going to eat up a heavy budeget in adWords very quickly to show up when all in all they could have keywords on their pages, built with a rich SEM plan, and have themselves a great eCommerce site that is search worthy. Have you thought about non-spammable hacks to get around the searchability of the flash eCommerce site?

I would love to know some non-spammable search engine optimization tricks. I have meta data obviously throughout my html page now, good titles, etc. I have used some tools online that submit to mass amounts of sites, webceo I believe. I have manually submited to more important engines. I have visited several discussion boards and while not spamming, made mention of what is available, I have also posted on hotscripts, etc. but if there is more, let me know...

My concern with small businesses is that Search Engines is just not even a viable choice. They aren't going to be the first bike shop to appear, the first quilting store to appear, nor do I ever plan on them being there. word of mouth, traditional methods are best for these folks, I hate seeing them soak a lot of money away into advertising hopes...

what do you think a guy should do with this market and this product?

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"surfing isn't just about riding down a wave, but the experience, motion, aesthetics, views, sounds, and sensations."
Level Four Storefront