I want a full Flash website!

This is the phrase that a web site design company that also does internet marketing hates to hear! Sure, Flash is great and makes your sit interesting, but what about the search engines and being indexed by them? What about the load time and the intro player that will cause many people to hit the back button on the browser, never to be seen or heard from again?

Flash is a very good application and used appropriately it can be a very powerful application. A website selling products should in most cases not be doing a full Flash website. A website promoting a rock band might be ok with a full Flash site, but not if they want to be found in the search engines any time soon!

The problem with Flash is that as of today there is no way for the search engine spiders to crawl through a Flash website to see what it is all about. A Flash website is like a movie when it comes to the search engines. For the most part it sees a page that calls a file (SWF file in most cases) and that file is unreadable to the spiders.

Flash can be effective if used appropriately though. For example a website that is built in HTML using style sheets that also has a small Flash banner with a marketing message is effective. The visitor is not required to wait for the movie to load to read everything else on the page and doesn’t have to hit “Skip Intro” in order to see the rest of your website.

Remember, when it comes to Flash less really is more!

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Ignite Media LLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization