Should My Site Be In Flash?
Summary:
If you are a large company that everyone knows, and you don't need search engines to get thousands of visits a day flash is fine. For everyone else read on.
Through experience we've known for a long time now that flash websites rarely make commercial sense. "What", I hear you cry, "that wonderful animated extravaganza is less than perfect?". Well unfortunately it is.
Before I condemn a large chunck of websites let me elaborate on what exactly is wrong. We all know that the success of a website is partly what they contain and partly who looks at them. If you're like many of our clients, you rely on search engines for much of your traffic, for this flash is still very much a losing formula.
When our potential customers come along to google, msn and others to search for us they'll type in a specific search term. This search term will be cross referenced against the search engines database and results will be displayed.
These results are all pages on the Internet. Not just home pages ( though these generally get shown for various reasons ) but all pages from your site. This enables search engines to send you to very specific pages. This is were our first problem occurs. Even if your flash site has been indexed for keywords ( explained later ) the search engine can only link to your front page. This is because flash sites are often a single page solution. The web address, unlike on HTML sites, does not change when buttons are clicked on in the site. This basically equates to search engines only seeing your site as one big page.
If you click the below link
You will see that this displays all the pages google has scanned of this site. If you do this for a flash generated site you will only see a single page. It doesn't take a genius to realise that Google and other search engines will prefer an HTML site like this were they can send you to specific information and not just to the site in general. ( see Mccann Erickson as an example )
In additon to the single page issue there are also problems with search engines linking to you for the right reasons. Search engines know what is in your site and what you do because of the text on your site. This text is very easy for search engines to read if your site is in HTML. The search engine 'indexes' your site by coming to your homepage, reading the contents and following the links of all your buttons to other pages of your site noting the words used in your site as they go.
With flash the search engines have to read your whole site (often contained in a single file) and try and extract the text which is often in an encoded format. Sometimes the flash file does not actually contain any of the text from your site because it is only loaded into the flash file on request as in the case of database driven flash sites. When this is the case search engines have no way of triggering this download of information so remain completely unaware as to what your site contains.
At Duo we don't develop flash only sites. We instead use flash in small elements on our sites as alternatives to images. This way we manage to go some way to creating interesting and interactive experiences without losing the search engine profile. All our sites have a multipage profile giving them an excellent chance of appearing on search engine result lists and they all get many unque visits a day.
If you have a flash only website and you're not getting the attension you were hoping for why not contact us for some remedial advice.