Online Articles | Flash Site Pitfalls
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Losing Focus In A Flash: Code Your Content
| Written by David A. Farrell | Published 06-12-07 - Updated 01-02-08 | Page 01 of 01 |
Most people understand that if you want to attract new visitors to your site, or simply keep the ones you already have coming back again and again, a site needs to have an impact on its traffic. The relatively recent introduction of the all-flash or virtually all-flash website certainly seems to fit the bill, but what many people don't know is that there remains a serious drawback for prospective clients interested in all-flash website construction: Copy embedded within flash elements cannot be read by search engine metacrawlers (search engine robots or 'spiders'). This means that although your flashy new website may be wonderfully designed and crazy with energy and motion, fetching plenty of ooh's and ahh's from friends and co-workers, search engines stopping by your site to see who and what you are simply have no way of evaluating your site for content and relavancy within your field.
If your plan is to aggresively advertise your website either online or in other external ways, an all-flash website may indeed be the way to go. But why throw out or ignore what could basically amount to hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of free advertising? That's right! "Free advertising" for your website -possibly thousands of dollars worth. And that's exactly what showing up well in organic search results can mean for you or your company. However, search engine robots must be able to read the copy on your website, and they cannot do that if your copy is embedded in flash. And let's face it, even if you or your company could afford to pass up that kind of savings and exposure, it's still pretty absurd.
The Happy Medium
Simply put, if you're online, you're in the business of getting noticed. No one puts up a website and says to himself, "I hope no one sees this". And it's hard enough to get noticed as it is. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of websites in every categorical niche you can imagine that no matter what they or their web developers do, they just cannot show up within the first fifty results of the top four search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. The reason for this is that there are simply a lot of great websites out there competing against you for position. Why make things more difficult than they already are? Encode your copy and make the robot-readable content of your website the priority of your design layout.
What's more, when incorporating flash is a must, do so sparingly, as flash animation (within SEO circles) can sometimes count against you if a high level of website optimization is your goal. This is because alongside hiding important copy points from search engine robots, flash animations are bulky, bite-wise, and are viewed by metacrawlers as just another large http request. The more http requests you have on any one particular page of your website the less optimized you are for search engine rankings. And if your animation is really large (like those found on all-flash or virtually all-flash websites), it's even worse. The general concensus is that the combined size of all external media should be under 40k, which is significantly small. Making this work is the objective of every good web developer. Find a web developer that will make it work for you, and tell them to 'code your content.'
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