The temporary menu solution for Impressions is an embedded PDF- Not an Iframe.
Besides the move, you may have seen the new website for Impressions Day Spa in progress. It’s turning out to be a great example of what RangerSanger can do with WordPress. One major problem with the WordPress CMS is no matter what theme you choose, it’s almost always very clearly a WordPress site. However, a professional designer can really get into the guts of it and make it totally custom. Check it out, it’s temporary home is at www.rangersanger.com/impressions/ It’s not done quite yet, but It’s set to be a great example of a simple website that connects all Impressions media in one place.
Looking back to our post where we learned from crappy restaurant websites, I see some flaws with the design already. The most glaring is the menu being embedded as a PDF. This is only temporary, but until it’s replaced by text the website will be hurting in readability, speed and SEO. Think about all the great keywords for a salon in a menu. Okay, we need to hit the brakes on that one, SEO might not be hurting in the end.
PDF’s have been indexed by Google since 2001. As long as you can highlight the text within the PDF and the PDF is linked to from a previously indexed page, it should show up in search results. The problem occurs when the PDF is embedded impropperly. Two very common ways to embed PDF’s are to host them on Scribd and use their embed code which places the PDF in an Iframe. Glaring probelm, iFrames aren’t indexed by search engines. So, instead of all those keywords going to Impressions, they would be going to Scribd. The second common way to embed a PDF is to use Flash. This is often a pretty way to display a PDF, but it’s also often a way to make sure your page won’t be indexed.
So what to do? We use the the <object> tag, this lets the PDF reside right there on the page giving the website the full benefits of the PDF. However, it is still ideal not to use a PDF. Why? It’s not the most convenient way to display the information, not everyone has a PDF reader installed and many many people don’t have the most recent version of their browser. This means there is a decent chance that the user won’t be able to read your menu.
But the site has some really good things going for it. It’s simple. That’s always number one. It’s readable by mobile devices like smartphones and Ipads. The old site for Impressions used Flash, mobile products hated it.
What the site is doing particularly well so far is acting as an aggregator for all of Impressions media. Their YouTube video shows up on the about page (this will soon be swapped to a Facebook video for reasons outlined in our post about video embedding.) There are links to all of their social media and there is a long form blog in place.
