The Internet has grown over
the past years in exponential amounts, which has had both
positive and negative effects. The Internet in essence,
should be a network of websites that contain valuable information
and services that cater to one person or another. There
is no law that says that a website must be flat. Although
this is true, the use of Flash in current times has deemed
some important websites that contain good information un-findable
via the search engines.
When a search engine indexes a website it will send a spider
or robot to crawl through the HTML documents of a website,
and it will decipher depending on the HTML content whether
or not it will index the site in their database. It also
deciphers from this process which search terms or keywords
the website will appear in the search engines under.
The problem is that the search engines are not currently
indexing Flash, and can't read the information contained
within the Flash. This means that all of the important information,
or an entire category of your site that is built with Flash
is not readable by the search engines and therefore not
able to be indexed.
I visit a certain website every so often that posts links
to other sites with exceptional designs. I followed a link
from this site recently to this site: http://www.ecko.com/.
This website has an excellent design, but utilizes Flash
for the navigation, content, links, and everything else.
After navigating through the site for a few minutes I noticed
that they sell shoes and other apparel.
I then went to Google and performed a search for shoes
and then for apparel... nowhere to be found. I then went
to Overture's keyword suggestion tool, and performed a search
for apparel and then for shoes. In the month of August,
the keyword “apparel” was searched for 33,124
times and “shoes” was searched for 196,733 times.
This is the amount of potential customers that Ecko is missing
out on, mainly because they use Flash and more importantly
because they do not use it correctly.
There is a proper way to use Flash on a website and a very
bad way to use Flash. If you are going to use Flash, there
are a few things to remember when designing or building
your site:
- Do not use Flash for the navigational structure
-
Do not have all of your important content contained in
the Flash movies
-
Do not use huge Flash objects that make the pages too
large in size
-
You must remember the users on dial-up connections that
will not wait 5 minutes to see your Flash movie
-
Do not make the site too complicated or too confusing,
as this will deter potential customers
From the few things above, you might think that there
is no actual use for Flash, and you are partially right.
Think of the negative effects that your website will see
as a result of having the whole site built in Flash:
- Losing potential customers
-
Beaten by competitors
-
Losing traffic to the website
-
Missing out on exposure on the Internet
-
Customers leaving website as a result of download times
-
Missing out on important branding possibilities
The one way to use Flash on your website that will not hinder
your capabilities of visibility and success on the Internet
is to have Flash as an option. There are many sites on the
Internet that have the Index page with the option of entering
the Flash version or the HTML version. The problem with
this is that they cannot optimize this page, and will have
to optimize the HTML version of the website. If the HTML
version is optimized, then the users will not be as easily
able to reach the Flash version if it is desired.
What is the alternative? Build your website in HTML, and
then build another version in Flash. On every page of the
HTML version have a button or link somewhere prominent on
the page that will give the visitor the option of entering
the Flash version. If this is done, then the website will
not miss out on the things mentioned above, and the visitor
is less likely to be frustrated with the website. |
RSS Feeds