Your Friend on the Web, Diana Ratliff

Website Strategy & Digital Consulting

Software

Beware Flash Website Builders

Twice this week I’ve had someone contact me who either has built or is building a site for themselves using Wix.com’s flash-based website builder.

I’ve gotta say that I don’t think this is a good idea at all.

Flash and SEO are like oil and water – they just don’t mix very well.  Google and other search engines don’t “read” flash – and pages with lots of flash content take longer to download.  Both hurt your chances of ranking high in the search engines.

And despite what Wix says about being the  only SEO-friendly website builder, there are so many things you have to understand to make sure you’re doing it right that I don’t feel it’s worth the effort.  Not when there are other options such as using WordPress to build your site.

HTTrack Website Copier – EASY!

Way back in my March 6, 2010 Web Wise Column, I talked about “website mirroring software” such as HTTrack and cURL.  Such software allows you to retrieve web pages and entire websites, whether or not you have access to logins or passwords.

HTTrack screenshotI’d never tried a couple of the tools I recommended – so today I figured I’d try HTTrack.  There’s a local charity who’d been having a hard time with web hosting (they’re trying to rely on donations) and their site has actually been down much of the past week.  So I figured downloading their site before things got any worse would be a good idea.

I was amazed at how easy HTTrack was to use!

Here’s how they describe it – from their website at http://www.httrack.com:

HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility.

It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site’s relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the “mirrored” website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.

It took about 5 minutes, start to finish.  Honest.

Downloaded the software and opened it.

Created a folder to store the downloaded site on my computer (I used their suggestion of C:My Web Sites).  Named this project.  Typed in the URL I wanted to download.  Didn’t tweak any of the other options – and hit NEXT.

That’s it!  Once the files were downloaded I hit FINISH, and opened the file in EditPlus (an HTML editor I like.)

Now this site wasn’t real big – less than a dozen pages, with no video or any really large images – but I’ll certainly try this software again.

UPDATE: As of 2020, the site is still active but the last update is from 2017.