We’ve got a couple of projects on the go at the moment that use Flash. I’m a huge fan of Flash…when it’s used in the correct context. There’s an excellent post from last summer on The Official Google Webmaster Blog that covers their perspective nicely. Here’s a snippet for starters…
As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn’t have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.
To that end, here’s a brief list of what I think are the good and bad uses…
Five things that Flash is good for…
- Fancy image galleries. There are some belters out there – my particular favourite at the moment is DFGallery. I like the way you can tie it in to Flickr accounts or use your own sets of images.
- Playing video. It’s not taken that long for the .flv format to become a standard. If you’ve ever used Youtube, you’ll have seen this use in full flight.
- Playing audio. Compared to other medium, it’s a pretty safe format to play audio on your site. MP3 still rules, but if you want to protect against piracy, placing your MP3 within a nice Flash mp3 player will do the job.
- Whistles and bells. If you are using a flexible CMS , then it should be easy to drop little Flash elements into your site templates. This is great for ‘lifting’ the look of a site. Horses for courses though. We’ve worked on a few corporate sites where it has to be fairly staid, but if you are working on a site that leans more to the creative side, then a nice flash interface embedded into the page may be the way to go.
- Making the impossible possible. We’re doing some pretty amazing things with Flash just now – the social story tool being just one of them.
Five things that Flash is good for nothing for…
- Annoying intro screens. I hate waiting ages (well, 30 seconds can seem like ages!) for an intro screen to complete just so I can find some contact details. Unless it’s for a very specific and worthwhile purpose, splash intro screens can often end up being a work of pure conceit on the part of the client. They’re often looked upon fondly by people that don’t use the web very much and think they look ‘cool’. They aren’t. They not only place your relevant and important content one click further away, but with your homepage being the most important page in terms of Google indexing, you’ll doing yourself out of some positioning.
- Navigation. Yes and no actually. The problem with Flash navigation is that it needs re-authored every time there’s a change. If you know your menu bar is hardly ever going to change then Flash should be fine (provided it is backed up with a decent HTML alternative) but if you think your site may be expanding at some point soon, spend your money on some decent CSS styling.
- Content. As our friends at Google point out, Googlebot doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links.
What I’ve found quite worrying lately is the number of websites that are designed in Flash but look like they are created using HTML and CSS. This shouldn’t happen but it does. Why? - Spreading the word. It is pretty difficult to provide links to individual pages within a Flash-authored site as the site itself is just one big movie.
- Keeping it updated. Flash-based content management systems just don’t offer the flexibility that a properly structured HTML-based content management system can offer.