To Flash or Not To Flash?
Advertising agencies love Flash sites because you can create a visually rich presentation experience that is unique and fresh. Many brands love Flash for the same reasons. But Flash has come under fire in recent years for a variety of reasons. From a workflow perspective, Flash is such a controlled environment that it is much more difficult to add content and new navigation items than is possible with a content managed HTML site. And from a search engine perspective, Flash doesn’t help your efforts to be discovered.
You can have your Flash and find it too, if your flash site is built with an understanding of what the search engines can and cannot read. For example, text that is embedded in your Flash files can be indexed by Google, but text that is pulled in from an external data source is not.
It is vital that your site’s search engine results create an optimized presentation of your content. You want each search result to link to a state within Flash that you determine. Also, each section of content should have its own URL, so that it appears in the search engine as a separate result.
If you build a Flash site, it’s very important to offer an alternative HTML content site so that users who do not have a Flash plug-in can still view your content. The experience won’t be the same, but it can still be good.
Finally, consider the option of using Flash judiciously as elements within a site. You can create rich, interactive experiences within a page, and offer alternative static images or javascript-energized code as a replacement for those who aren’t flash-ready. This is perhaps the most viable option, and certainly my favorite, because you can have the benefits of Flash while making the rest of your site easy to manage and update.
The state of Flash and Search is constantly changing. What is impossible today, might be trivial in another year. It’s important to keep up with the latest changes and adjust your online strategy to exploit the best opportunities. Everybody has a favorite Flash site. What’s yours?
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