Can someone tell me the best software to use to see if a navgation system is visible to search engines. I have turned off javascript in firefox and the site does not even load. In IE if it is just the same with actice scripting disabled? Any advice to do a quick check without having to fully understand the source code?
If you are talking about the navigation on your domain name website, I recommend changing it. It is a bad idea to use Flash for your navigation links. Most search engines cannot crawl such links. The ones that can likely don't do it very well. I don't understand why you use flash for both your header and footer navigation. The footer navigation doesn't even use any special flash features. It is a much better idea to use standard html text links for your footer navigation. You may also want to consider different technology for your header navigation too. There are more search engine friendly drop down menu scripts.
What you did by turning off Javascript in Firefox and browsing will give you a decent indication of what they see. Also you can find your page in the Google SERPs, click on the "Cached" link next to the URL, then click on the Text Only link in the top right hand corner of the cached page. This is "generally" what they see as well... I TOTALLY agree w/ what vamsterdam said about Flash. It's a TERRIBLE idea to build an entire site out of it or even to use it for your navigation. Flash has it's place, but if you care about being found in the organic SERPs avoid it like the plague unless there is something you absolutely need to do but can't do in HTML. Even though the search engines have been given the specs from Adobe recently on how to read their binaries, per Cutts at Pubcon this past November, it will be years before the engines are really any good at indexing Flash content, and even then the same content in HTML will ALWAYS outrank the same content in Flash. Even when they can index the content in Flash well, it still presents all kinds of problems for SEO, the least of which is that ALL of the content contained in the .swf get indexed under a single URL. A well SEO'd site will have different pages to target specific keyword phrases... Imagine taking all of the content on a 100 page web site and putting it all on a single page web site. Making 1 page rank well for hundreds of phrases is VERY difficult. It makes you TOTALLY dependent on inbound links to rank (which are off-page factors that typically are out of your control). Making hundreds of pages each rank for a single keyword phrase is much easier because you can at least optimize the on-page factors of each page around it's targeted keyword phrase...
Thanks guys for advice. These sites are just flash templates while i build css/xhtml ones. Needed info for looking at other sites.