 Many people continue to use Flash to design their websites. I appreciate the value of Flash elements (think streaming video and interactive banner adverts) but would argue that it is not usually cost effective and is often relatively inefficient.
Building an entire site in Flash is wrong for many reasons:
- Search engines do not like Flash: One of 3B's primary objectives is to optimise our clients' sites for search engines (SEO). No search engine can "fully" index a flash site's content which means that you will never fulfil your site's potential.
- Flash requires more bandwidth: Sites designed in flash can take longer to load/process and require the Flash plug-in to work successfully - something that doesn't come as standard on new computers, and most mobile browsers have huge problems with (iPhone!).
- Flash sites ignore the users' needs: Flash sites control how the user navigates/uses the site. Splash screens, intros and automatic sound can be annoying and time consuming. Sometimes the site even pushes the user where it wants to go and not allow the user to go where they want them to go - why on earth would you want to delay someone from getting to the information they want?
- The browser's back button is disabled: This is annoying and can affect navigation of the site.
- Copying and printing pages is poor: Trying to select text from a Flash site is very hard and often impossible and the printing quality of Flash pages is also inconsistent - often you end up with all your ink being used up and very little useful content printed out!
How does Flash work?
A website is delivered to your browser as a collection of pages with each page having its own text, tags and images. Each page is either linked to internally or from other external sites. Flash sites are made up of one or more SWF files. The data within these files is displayed within a single page and content is referenced based on time. It's the equivalent of storing all the information on a site in one big jumbled paragraph. This means there are issues when trying to search this content.
Search engines are very complex but are inherently stupid. They follow rules and they need to be told about page headings (<h1> tags), the context of links (anchor tags) and work better when referencing one topic per page. The content that is indexed in a SWF file is treated like the content in a plain text file (no additional weight/factors) unless it is linked to something outside that file. So whilst indexing a Flash site (SWF file) is possible (and always has been) it is complicated and never 100% successful.
So why do so many people design their site in Flash?
I understand that a Flash site can be visually appealing. The use of vector graphics, animations, gradients and sound effects can be very effective. But at the end of the day all the benefits of Flash are overridden by the disadvantages in terms of SEO and usability.
Why Flash is bad for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
The problem with SWF files is that even though search engines can crawl through the file and index its content, there is still a big difference in being able to rank and optimise that file for search results. Simple text fields held on a single screen or scenes with limited actionscript can be crawled through, fully extracted and indexed. But if you ever convert any of this text into something else (button, symbol etc) which most Flash sites do, then the search engines start to have problems.
New to Flash
There have been some announcements of late by Adobe saying that they are licensing new technology to search engines to make Flash sites more search engine friendly. They are talking about a "Search SDK" that has been around for a while... so why the announcement?
There have been some developments in Flash over recent years. If you now design a Flash site using SWFObject, UFO or the new CS3 method then the content that is produced is more optimised. If you combine these methods with SWFAddress and a htaccess file then an even more optimised site is possible. There is still a big difference between a site being fully indexed and a site being fully optimised. Flash is not capable of both of these things.
What is Flash good for?
For Streaming video, Flash is amazing (youtube) and as an illustrative tool it is second to none. It is also very good for web banners and adverts. Flash has come a long way, but it still lacks the ubiquity, compatability, usability and ease-of-use that visitors should demand from websites.
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