Sterkinekor.com has won the Best Functional Website award in the online category of the annual Construction New Media Awards, according to an article today on Bizcommunity. The awards are said to “celebrate and elevate the status of new media design in South Africa” and were launched in conjunction with the Design Indaba six years ago.
While congratulations are definitely in order for the site’s excellent look-and-feel and novel functionality, the online marketing bells inside my head are ringing a loud warning tune. Why? Sterkinekor.com is built entirely in Macromedia Flash. While Flash websites can look exceptionally attractive and offer the user an alluring interactive experience, content delivered via Flash is largely inaccessible by search engine spiders.
Why is this an issue? If your site isn’t (or worse – can’t be) indexed properly on the major search engines, you’re missing out on a huge potential customer base.
I entered three search phrases into Google South Africa which I hoped would yield at least some results that linked to SterKinekor.com. After looking through the first five pages of results (typically, hardly anyone looks this far into the results anyway) the outcome was as follows:
• ‘movie schedules’: nothing
• ‘movie times’: nothing
• ‘movie showings’: nothing
These are all search terms that are highly likely to be searched for by anyone looking for movie screening information in South Africa, yet nowhere in the first 50 results for all three terms is there a link to Sterkinekor.com.
By building their entire website in Flash, Ster Kinekor has effectively cut off hundreds of potential entry points into their site. Their site is not ranking well in Google for search terms, like those above, which moviegoers are searching for on a daily basis. Additionally, movie fans looking for reviews/synopses of current movies showing at Ster Kinekor have about the same chance of finding this information on Ster Kinekor.com via a search engine as a rock has of winning the lottery.
So while the site itself is brilliantly done in terms of synergising information and interactivity (though not without a few much-discussed hurdles and glitches last year), the value of this is severely diminished and overshadowed by the site’s lack of presence on the Internet. You want to spread your website’s cyber arms as wide as possible so as to attract as many visitors as possible – and structuring your content in such a way as to be largely inaccessible to major search engines is online suicide.
Winning a prestigious Best Functional Website award is all well and good, but glitz, glam and ease-of-use are useless if the site is practically indiscoverable on the Internet.
And it may be apt but can’t be too healthy for your online reputation when the 4th result of a ‘Ster Kinekor’ Google search yields a page entitled “Ster Kinekor, wake the f*ck up!”
Related Ster Kinekor posts on GottaQuirk: Rob Stokes with Are communities important? and Ster Kinekor – the sequel
Quirk is a marketing agency. Born digital. Driven by creativity. Disciplined by results.
A blog on the convergence of marketing and technology from the minds of Quirk
Ster Kinekor: always better on the SERPs... or not
by Michael Salzwedel
2007/03/06
Comments
prezence, the design agency, has to thank the girls and boys giving feedback at coda.co.za and other sites. otherwise the site would still probably suck.
Why should they waste money with online marketing when everyone knows there is almost 99% of the time a movie house in every shopping centre for you to see movies and what's on/times, you can pick up your local paper to see what's showing and times, and they have a tollfree number you call.... Most of the time the only reason people know what's showing is from the Trailers on TV which almost every South African sees or hears about from a friend or collegue, teenagers hanging around the shopping malls will get mommies and daddy's to give them money to go see movies, not sit at home all the time looking for movies on the net, besides those that are downloading...
I think you'll find as the internet grows in South Africa, in all honesty still in it's infancy, people would turn to the internet to do most of those things. Being in an office in front of a computer for 9-10 hours per day, it's much more convenient visiting the site and booking the ticket and get it done with. I don't want to hold the line, speak to people when you have a system perfectly capable of doing this quicker and more efficient. I believe there are thousands people who behave in exactly the same manner. Expect those numbers to increase dramatically in the near future. If you don't embrace the internet and what it can do for you, your company will not survive. Simple as that.
Brett: you mentioned five offline means by which moviegoers can find out about or book movies: the cinemas themselves, newspapers, toll-free numbers and word-of-mouth. None of these offer an all-in-one solution like the Internet does. going to the cinema lets you see what's on and when, and book tickets. The newspapers tell you what's on and when, with a few reviews/synopses of some current movies if you're lucky. Toll-free numbers let you find out what's on and at what times, and book a ticket. Word-of-mouth gives you non-guaranteed information and what's on and where, and what a movie is about.
The Internet lets you find out what's on, where it's on, when it's on, what it's about (in the form of detailed reviews/synopses which very easily accessible on the internet), and lets you book tickets. Thus, the internet offers an all-in-one movie solution, which surely makes it a comprehensive and thus ideal way to interact with moviegoers? In a busy world of cluttered information, shouldn't we be striving to find efficient, 1-stop, all-in-one solutions?
The Internet lets you find out what's on, where it's on, when it's on, what it's about (in the form of detailed reviews/synopses which very easily accessible on the internet), and lets you book tickets. Thus, the internet offers an all-in-one movie solution, which surely makes it a comprehensive and thus ideal way to interact with moviegoers? In a busy world of cluttered information, shouldn't we be striving to find efficient, 1-stop, all-in-one solutions?
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Posted by Henre on 2007/03/06