raddesignz

Whether asked by clients or approached by friends regarding developing a new website, I consistently hear, “I want all the bells and whistles, I want movement, flash, with cool fade-ins, blinking stars, flashing headlights…oh and did I mention I want to be ranked on the first page of search engine results.” It amazes me that this day in age, Search Engine placement is still an after thought for most business owners. I mean, what good is a cool looking, full flash website if no one can find you on the internet?” While there are a number of reasons people think they want a website built entirely in flash, if your main purpose for your website is business or generating traffic of any kind the cons far outweigh the pros.

Search engines “spider” or “crawl” the web on a fairly freqent basis scanning, reading and indexing millions upon millions of web pages. Without getting into too much detail on how search engines generally work, search engines cannot index full flash websites. The content is compressed into one .swf (flash) file where as HTML or text is not.

Although flash animation has its role on the Web, it still has a long way to go in regards to search engine optimization.  It should be used sparingly to enhance a site, not to distract from it. Make sure your users are able to get to the content they want and don’t make them jump through hoops by having to sit through lengthy flash intro’s and by not being able to use their browsers navigation buttons.