Adobe Flash is an animation application which runs in most browsers provided that you have the required FlashPlayer Plugin. Flash heralded a new era in webpage design by allowing designers full control over layout, type choices and many amazing effects and behaviours including playing embedded movies, mp3 players, fade-ins, zoom-ins, text flying across the screen – in fact the possibilities are endless.
You can understand the excitement given the limitations of earlier web standards. But if something seems too good to be true, it usually is. Unfortunately the emancipation of the web designer comes at a price.
The simple truth #1 is that whilst designers and marketers LOVE Flash home pages, they are invisible to Search Engines!
Why? Flash in itself is an embedded object. It has it's origins in multimedia software and happens to run in a browser with the right plug-in. Google, Yahoo! And other crawlers look at the source code behind a page. They index that page in relation to many individual factors, the main one being content. In the case of a Flash object, the crawler cannot find any content and so moves on. Game over.
Truth #2 about Flash. It is almost impossible to maintain a Flash page in-house. Which means that you are back to square one in terms of managing your site. This is a huge step backwards at a time where Content Management Solutions are becoming very good and very accessible to most businesses.
Flash is expensive. Flash is not what we would call rapid development. And it's not self-maintaining. Therefore it's not cost effective to build nor manage into the future.
A familiar tale
Early in 2006, we were asked by the CEO of a high profile Sydney restaurant group to provide a proposal on re-designing his company’s website in Flash. (We developed the brand strategy and 1st generation site in 2000). So I met with our client (with whom I’d had a long and happy business relationship) and explained the downside to his objectives. His argument was based on his competitors globally.
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An entire industry had adopted the sex appeal of a Flash presentation. I countered by saying that just because an entire industry was using a non-standard technology, it didn’t make the practise a best practise. I was given a very direct (and short) rebuke and lecture on how I was not seeing the big picture and was sent me on my way.
A happy ending
However there is a best practise solution that will meet both Google’s criteria and satisfy the most avant garde creatives. The solution is to design a great webpage to the current WC3 standards using real type and CSS and embed a Flash component within your page. Problem solved. (see our home page)
There is a way to have it all!
If you really feel compelled to have Flash entirely as your homepage, then develop the rest of your site in compliant web standards and only submit your 2nd level pages to Google (effectively bypassing Flash). That way you can still optimise your site and look like a business that knows what it's doing! A nice compromise. Problem solved.
As designers, the Cracker team make no apologies to clients for not creating the latest Flash home page animation. In fact when we explain the pitfalls, most clients respect and appreciate our direct resistance to it.
The message to business owners and marketers; insist on having it all. Ask your designer for a scalable content management solution, and WC3 compliant website using CSS2, and make it fully optimised for search so that Google will understand it and still make it look amazing.
The message to Designers, dare to be different and DON’T push a Flash homepage.
Postscript: You might be wondering what became of our restaurateur friend? He got what he wanted. His site took more than 18 months to complete, he lost his Google page rank and every time he wants to change his menu it costs him in maintenance fees. Admittedly the site looks wonderful, but as one of my key designers ironically remarked recently, there wasn’t any aspect to the final result that we could not have achieved with compliant code running on a Content Management System delivering dynamic content.