We’ve landed a new web design client for our company, and we’re very excited about the project. In particular, we’re looking forward to creating a site for this client that blows away the competition with regards to usability, design, ease of maintenance, and search engine friendliness.

That last one won’t be too hard to pull off, since in this space every single competitor’s site is Flash-based.

Now, we love Flash. And this client’s website will have some Flash on it. But even as search engines start to index some of the text in a Flash file, they miss a lot of important stuff. Agencies that deploy all-Flash websites for their clients without any sort of thought about accessibility are really doing their clients a disservice. No matter how beautiful the websites are, search engines pass them by as if they don’t exist.

So of course we’re building this new client website using web standards as much as possible. And anytime we use Flash we’ll also provide non-Flash fallback content. Sure, it costs more to build websites this way. But it’s the right thing to do. We’ll also be creating a nice MODx backend admin website so the client will be able to easily update the site. Again, it’s the right thing to do.

The difference between a successful website and a failure is often set at the planning stage. Decisions made about the architecture of the website reverberate throughout all phases of the project. It’s important to get it right.

We try to only take on clients who we want a long-term relationship with, so for us it’s vital to spend the extra time and energy upfront to get it right. Mostly, this attention to detail pays off.