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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While contemplating how to pitch a long-standing client for new web services, I came to the realization that we need to convince them to kill off their current website. It’s a beautiful site, filled with many subtle touches. But it’s a Flash site, and as such, it has many limitations. You can add content, but not without changing the design and nowhere near as easily as if we just designed a new CMS-enabled site for them.

Because the Flash site wasn’t created to hold an ever-deepening well of content, it takes about 15 minutes at the most to exhaust anyone’s curiosity and you’re left with this toy that just sits there like an animatronic toy with limited behavior set. This site does not serve their brand nearly as well as they may think it does.

And since it’s a Flash site, we won’t be able to plug in our behavioral analytics tools to show them how users are interacting with the site. We will have a difficult time building a case based on hard numbers. Instead, we’ll approach the problem from another angle, the website as social media hub.

As a brand, it’s important that they reach their customers but they don’t get to pick the channel any longer. The day of the website as your channel to your customers is dead. Brands need a social media hub that allows them to update content for customer reach in one place, and broadcast that message to the customers where and how they want to be reached.

To explain what I mean, let me offer an example. You can reach my wife through email or Facebook, and maybe her Yahoo News page. My sister is only going to see text-based email. You can find me through several channels, but I’d prefer to have anything a brand has to say come through an RSS feed so that I can decide when I have time for it. I don’t want more email cluttering my inbox, and I probably won’t visit your website on my daily rounds. If a brand want to interact with me, they better give me choices.

It’s possible to build a social media hub in Flash but when I crunch the numbers on the development hours involved, it simply doesn’t make sense. Every new thing we come up with will both cost more and take us further from the simple and elegant design of a well-executed Flash site and more toward the web 2.o open source toolkit. It makes sense to just scrap the Flash site and start building fresh with the toolkit.

Now if only I can convince the client… I welcome your suggestions on how I can be the most convincing.

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