all-flash website: yes or no?
I just found this short and to-the-point flowchart over at The Google Cache that helps you (or your clients) to decide whether or not to use an all-flash website.
Ok, so it’s overly simplified. Personally, I think some pages can benefit from being all-flash, like a virtual tour that is part of a bigger site, but I do try to discourage my clients from having a flash-only site. If you’re unaware of the downsides to flash, the biggest reason is because search engines are completely blind to content in a flash movie. Completely. And even if you’re not overly concerned about being available to search engines, that doesn’t mean your business or organization wouldn’t benefit from that availability.
Think about this: I’ve had to remove quite a few of the flash-only websites I’ve done from my own portfolio, because my website (an HTML portfolio) was achieving higher search rankings than my clients’ sites (flash-only). That’s right, one deeply buried page in my site was outranking and entire website. That’s what happens with a flash-only site.
Another reason that isn’t obvious to most people: flash websites are not accessible to disabled users. Screen readers (used by blind internet users) can’t read a flash movie any better than a search engine can.
What are the options? If you want the oooh and aaah of flash, but want to have a search-engine accessible site, there are two simple options. One is to create a second version of your site, in plain, SEO-friendly HTML. The other is to re-delegate the flash to a smaller portion of the website. A good example is a recent project of mine that just went live, the Motivation Through Incentives website. Instead of a flash-only website, or a flash-only intro animation, we had a very productive meeting about how best to use flash and came up with the solution of including flash in a header animation. As a result, MI’s content is right there for any search engine to see and index. (and, by the way, thanks again to Trinity for producing such a great animation)
If you’re interested in using flash on your website, let me know and I’d love to help you figure out the best way to implement it. After all, Flash is still very, very cool. Websites are still just trying to figure out the best way to use it, is all.