Many websites run with flash content on them – from as little as a small video to a full featured website. These sites may look very good, even quite ‘sexy’, and have lots interesting effects on them.
So why is Flash a problem?
Google, and the other big name search engines such as Yahoo!, Bing and Ask, don’t index the content that’s stored in a flash file as it too hard to understand what the content is as it is embedded within the file. This is bad from an SEO point of view as there will be no content for the search engines to pick up, so how are customers going to find your site?
Rachel has recently posted about the importance of having content on your site which you can read about here: Is Website Content King
Flash also creates the following problems:
- A slower performance time is noted. This is because it takes longer for the browser to load up the extra plug-ins that Flash requires. Times vary between browsers (with Chrome being the fastest). You may be interested in reading my post about the different choice of browsers.
Customers visiting your website have to wait longer to view the page which can potentially lead to losing customers.
- Flash Player needs to be installed to view pages deigned with Flash. Most internet users have flash installed on their computers nowadays so this is not a huge problem compared to a few years ago. Different versions of flash can cause compatibility issues and there is no 100% way to make sure the user has the version they need to run your site!
Good news!
HTML5 and CSS3 are soon to be released enabling a lot of features including transitions effects which is better support for cross browser compatible. You can enjoy HTML5 and CSS3 on webkit browsers (Safari and Chrome) but Firefox has a limited support for these features and Internet Explorer has very little support for these.
If you can’t wait to enjoy these new features switch to Chrome and enjoy the new web! Need a new site instead of a flash website why not get a quote from us today!
Web design is an art, I love it. When reading posts like the above, it makes me go back many years ago and think about when I started. It is amazing how much new concepts over the years. Great post, congrats.
I have been researching all kinds of stuff to try and work on my search engine rankings for my sites. I have attempted using article distribution services, content spinners, profile links, you name it. So I appreciate the posts here on your blog.
Thanks for your very informative post, I have bookmarked your site, thanks much!
going to show my boyfriend this later
I had errors viewing the site in Firefox on the Mac, but I still loved the post!
I’ve just subscribed to your RSS feed. I love your content.
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Perfect. I bookmarked this….
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