A  flash designer has just replied via twitter to an article I wrote some time ago, to say that the info is 10 years out of date, as flash is fine for search engines.

So, as well as replying to that message via twitter, I thought hmm this guy does have a point, so I’ll write a post about it.

Firstly, it’s not ten years out of date, haha, talk about exaggerating, it was only towards the end of last year that Adobe made a real breakthrough in making flash more SE friendly, and it’s still not perfect, there are still limitations. But I do have to admit, there have been a lot of developments since I wrote the article, so it is slightly out of date.

But having said that – do I think that it’s a good idea to design sites completely  in flash?  No!

Why?

Well – first of all, I went to view the website of the flash designer who sent me the twitter message, and guess what – I can’t view his site….

It tells me it was designed for Flash version 10, and that I need to upgrade to this version to view it.

When you’re searching Google for something, and you get a message that you have to upgrade or download something in order to view a site – do you have the time & patience to do that?

Probably not, you’re just as likely to click the back button & go back to google & find a site that works first time, aren’t you?  It’s certainly what I would do.

And if you get to a site that is completely designed in flash, and you do have the correct flash player to view it – are you going to wait while it downloads?

And then when it downloads, and you find that the navigation is “clunky” a pain to browse, a strain to find what you’re looking for through the OTT flowery design, at some point there’s a good chance that you’re going to get fed up & leave well before you buy anything or sign up for anything, wouldn’t you say?

Not to say that all sites designed with flash are over the top & hard to view – in fact I see some, and I’m just at a loss to why flash had to be used. A client came to me recently with a website with a black background, and a white logo, and some navigation – that’s it, and completely designed in Flash, it had cost him way over the top for such a simple website – he had been told that he was getting a state of the art website because it was designed in flash….

Why? I don’t get it, it looks like a standard text based site, so why design it in flash? weird.

The fact is, it’s still a lot better for lots of reasons, and mainly for user experience, to have the main content text based, not embedded in flash & images.

If a site needs something that flash can provide, then fine, have a flash header designed – having elements of flash to achieve something in specific is fine – but having a site designed completely in flash without any strong reason – I just don’t see the point. Am I missing something?

Please – someone tell me, am I really missing something here? I may be. If you know, if I’m being really stupid here and there is a really strong reason to design a site that could easily be designed without flash – please leave a comment & let me know.

For instance, the website of the flash designer who left the post on twitter correctly advising me that one of my articles was out of date (though over exaggerating on how out of date, 10 years, haha), when I finally managed to get onto it, after faffing about trying to get flash 10 to install on firefox, giving up & reverting back to IE (yuck!) I found a simple website, with a photo of a piece of wood, and his name, phone number & email.

Why build this in flash? I don’t get it. Knowing that a certain number of visitors won’t be able to view the site, – what is the plus of using flash to build a site that could be built in html in 5 mins?

Not putting the site down, it looks fine – but it would look exactly the same in HTML, I can’t see what using flash has brought to the table here – and it’s rare that I do when looking at a flash site.

There’s an obvious negative to using flash, in that a certain percentage of visitors won’t be able to view the site – and usually they cost more to have designed, so what is the benefit of using flash to design a site if there is no specific reason that html wouldn’t do it?

SO i quizzed the guy a bit more, trying to find out what the reason would be, his reason was that you can do a lot of stuff with flash. Yes, I understand that – but why use flash just because you could do a lot of stuff with it, if you’re not using it to do any of this stuff with the site in question?  So – I still don’t have an answer.

So, yes flash is improving in terms of SE friendliness, but I still wouldn’t go out of my way to have a site buit in flash, I would happily use some elements of flash in projects when required, but I wouldn’t have a site completely built in flash unless there was a good reason – and if there was, I would also make sure there was an HTML version of the site for those who don’t have the correct flash player & can’t be bothered messing about upgrading at that particular time.

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