Using a image text box as main content of Home page!

Please have a look at this - not it seen before.

[gilbertl]

I've been asked by a friend to look at his website. It was designed by one of his other friends. Well I'm no expert, but I do have my own businesses' site designed professionally and looking at his, it's not good (writen in MS-FP I think).

He asked about being found on Google, looking at it there is lots that can be done with getting links etc. But - and this is finally my question - when I do a spider simulation of his Home page the content found is just the footer. The main text seems to be in a "Image Text box"?

Although looking at the source there is the text also there in html.

Anyone know why this is? If Image text boxes are seen as content by search engines? Why the actual text in the source not seen?

I don't want to disrupt forum policy, so hope putting the site address for you to look at is okay: www.inacarton.co.uk

many thanks.

[adb64]

Yes, I've seen this before with a site written in MS-Word and saved as HTML. Word then also saves an image with the page contents as how it will be rendered by IE. In the page there is a lot of MS proprietary markup which is understood only by IE. When viewed e.g. in Firefox, Firefox will display the image.
This also means that a spider simulator will behave like Firefox and only see the image and not the MS proprietary formatting and text which is between HTML comment tags.

[gilbertl]

Ah, yes you are right. When I view it in Firefox it is clearly an image. Sounds as though this page ought to be scrapped and start again with clean code?

So Google et.al. will certainly not see any content of note on the page?

[adb64]

I don't know how 'smart' Google is in interpreting these MS specific markup. If it just skips HTML comments, it will index only the title and meta tags.
If the site is already online for quite some time you could use site:www.mysite.com in Google to see which pages are indexed and what has been indexed.