Risharde's Blog

Hi everyone, I've been surfing the internet a little more than usual this week and came across a few snazzy looking flash websites that companies have. I have to admit that they do indeed look fantastic and I'm sure companies want graphics and art to pull customers in.

There is however an issue which I don't believe a lot of web designers tell their clients about "full flash websites" so I'll attempt to do so. Flash is of course an embedded object and the flash file is not human readable itself which is why the flash player is used to view the data in the flash file. So consider if a search engine was crawling your website to index it - it would see a flash file but wouldn't understand what content was in the flash file. How is this bad? Well a typical site like this blog uses HTML which crawlers can understand thus when the crawler indexes the website, users can easily search for a particular topic and find a link to this blog. That won't happen for Flash websites unless there's meta data or html data that relates to your website for the engine to understand.

So while its all nice, fine and dandy to have terrific effects, you should also be considered about targetting a wider audience (which I suppose is every company's main goal). A balance between flash and html will do the trick.