To Flash or Not to Flash?

Oh how I love flash! I do, it makes the sometimes boring, mundane web surfing much more fun. I suppose you could refer to me as flashy, but I’d really rather that you didn’t.

There are so many cutting edge websites out there that are flash based design. Check out a few pretty neat ones:

Mark Aurel Designer
HBO
The Simpsons Movie
Office Max Elf yourself

If you are interested in ranking high in the SERPs (search engine results pages) based on SEO (search engine optimization), you should probably forgo the flash. I know…I know…so sad! But it’s true. Rather than having a flash intro that takes a long time to load and causes your visitors to close the browser for lack of patience, why not add a little flash element to your homepage instead?

If you are a big brand name company, you can get away with putting up an all-flash site. People are already going to be Googling your company name to get to your site. If you’re a smaller company that hasn’t established its brand – you should stick to searchable content for your sites pages. You need to have content on your home page that the robots and spiders can read and index.

You can add flash elements such as a flash advertisement to drive customers through your sales funnel, or maybe a flash slideshow that showcases your highest selling products.

Another element to consider would be a flash header/ menu (which we have), just remember to also include text links to your main menu pages so that the robots and spiders can follow the links and your visitors who don’t have flash can find your content.

I wish the big 3 would just come up with a way to easily index all of the content in flash sites, until they do – the little guys have to play it straightforward.

Joanne