[Jacob Haug]

Okay, I am doing a website for a singer. She wants to have a media player, like the other big players in the music biz. The thing is most of them are building their websites using flash, so the media player is not going to kick off and restart on every page like it does on an xhtml/css website.

Now I have no problem doing a flash website, but I am working on a team for this project and instead we are going to integrate little flash elements into the site to make it look cool. Problem is she wants the music to play through out the site without kicking off, and we don't want to build a completely flash website.

So what are my options?

1. Frames (Bad SEO)
2. Ajax (Bad SEO cause it would stay index.php correct?)
3. Popup (Dang popup blockers)
4.

What would you guys and girls recommend?

[marcamos]

Here are her/your options in order of what is right:

1. She gets over it and realizes that music cannot play on every page, continuously
2. You build it in all Flash
3. You utilize a popup window and hope the visitor doesn't close it or auto-block it
4. You utilize an iFrame

That's really it. I suggest #1, and let her know that unless it becomes an entire Flash site, it just won't happen.

[Jacob Haug]

I know she just keeps sending me to places like Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera and sites like that. Well Jacob, how are they doing it there? Now, now...that is a completely flash site. I told you that is not the best option if you are worried about search engine rankings....hehehe.

So how bad would it be to place an iframe at the bottom of the website, near the footer? The content would not be in frames, would it really be all that bad? I hate this...lol.

[sypher]

Do not worry about SEO at all. This is for an already famous singer so there would be no need to worry about it

I mean what are they going to target? Gladys Knight? The site will already get #1 for that once its launched because people will link to it.

I would suggest building the best site you conforming to her guidelines while also attracting future clients for you.

[Jacob Haug]

hahaha...so are you saying do it all in flash? I kinda thought about doing two websites, a flash and an xhtml/css site. Then linking them together though a CMS. But I was told that was bad for SEO as well, but hey...you say don't worry about it, I won't I guess...hehe.

[Catalyst]

I say do it in Flash and layer the flash over some html content.

[Jacob Haug]

Yeah, I don't really want to hear Ryan and Karinne cry about me doing it in flash...lol. You just don't know Ryan that well do you now?

[Karl Buckland]

If this is for someone famous then seo isn't too important. If this is the official site, with a sensible domain name, then people will find it.

[sypher]

Aim for getting on the FWA Dont worry what other people say.

[Jacob Haug]

hahaha...well I have two problems. One is the first site which needs good SEO rankings, is her choir site.

http://www.suvchoir.org/

Now that is one of the sites she wants a music player on. This is a famous choir that has won several grammy's etc, but has horrible SEO rankings. It would be nice if someone typed in Gladys Knight and her website came up, then under that her choir website.

But that is going to be a hard thing for th choir website...no?

Note: I sure hope I have not screwed up her rankings by saying her name...lol.

[sypher]

So you have to do two sites?

[Jacob Haug]

Yes I am doing two sites for Gladys.

[sypher]

Unfortunately you cant pick and choose about where you want the results to show up.

But as long as it has quite a few sites linking to the choir sites with the term 'Gladys Knight' it will show up.

[Telos]

Artist websites are good places to go with full flash not to mention it solves your music player problem too. I mean artist websites allow a lot more artistic freedom than "boring" company websites so you can put her singing there or something like that. I think the idea of having a full flash on top of html content would be good idea.

If you go with full flash the joined CMS can be tricky (don't know anything about flash CMS's) so it will probably be better to separate the sites on that part. Joined CMS would be ideal but I don't think the client will mind having two either.