5 Reasons to Stop Using Flash on Your Website
Since the early days of 2000, where my internet career started, I have always had my hurdle with Flash designers. While I always have agreed that Flash can be a useful tool, many web designers have misunderstood the use of Flash, and started making Full-Flash pages, crazy animation and sounds, and in general just misusing this tool. Unfortunately I noticed Peru isn’t exempt from such a situation. If you are interested in making a successful online presence for your company (or maybe are a developer yourself), you should read on to get 5 reasons to stop using Flash.
#1: The Search Engines cannot read your site!
The most important reason not to use Flash on your website, is the way Flash works in regards to SEO. For those who have not heard about it, SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, and is a term of what you can do, to make Google and other Search Engines (like Bing and Yahoo) rank your site higher. SEO is a big subject, so we will have more posts about SEO for beginners later.
Now regarding Flash, it is one of the worst things you can do to your website. In order for Google to index and list your website, they need to read the text of your website. If you use Flash to show this content to your users, Google will not be able to read you content, and will not know where to put your website. In other words, Search Engines can only read text; Flash has no text. Search Engines finds your site and content by following links; Flash has no links. By using a Full Flash website, you are making sure that your customers will have very poor chances of finding your business website through Google and other search engines.
#2: Not a true standard
All browsers can read and understand HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We all know and understand how to use the browser when we receive our new computer. With Flash we are required to take action, and install the Flash Player on our computer. Though most computers today have Flash installed, it is still not everyone who runs Flash. Platforms like iPhone and iPad from Apple does not support Flash. By making a complete Flash site, you are excluding users from your site.
#3: Requires more bandwidth and is CPU Heavy
When you enter a Flash page, you are often prompted by “Loading…” bars, and have to wait for all the content to download, before you can view the page. Since most Flash designers seem to hate simplicity in their designs, they often go for big media-rich pages, which often include animations and music. When you finally have loaded all the content, it can slow down your computer; especially if you are using an older computer, and have a few different websites open in your browser.
#4: Breaks the rules of the web
During all the time the web has existed and seemingly becoming more popular, one of the reasons is the basic rules. When we browse the web, we know how we click on links, scroll down a page, press the back-button in the browser to go back to where we came from and share links with our friends by bookmarking and copy/pasting the address. Many of these function, like bookmarking or linking to a sub-page or using the browsers back-button, are not enabled in most Flash sites, and will general make it harder for the users to navigate your site. On most standard Flash sites, you can’t print a page or simply copy/paste some text either.
Number #5: Can be replaced by other technologies
Today more and more browsers are supporting HTML5 and CSS3, together with optimizing the speed of JavaScript. Together with libraries such as Jquery and Mootools, this gives developers new ways to make graphic and moving things on a website, without having to use Flash. This also allows for making smoother and more graphical navigation on your site, and will often be faster to load than Flash and be supported on all platforms and browsers (Cell phones, PS3, PSP, iPhones & iPads, etc)
I hope that these 5 strong reasons can make more “web designers” to understand that they should never use Flash to make a full website. And even more important, Business owners who are hiring a web designer should know, that you should never hire someone who offers to make a full site in Flash. While Flash does have a few good uses, it is not useful for most websites.
