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Jan 15 2012

Portland Web Design | 4 Reasons Why Your Flash Web Site Won’t Help You

As a web design professional, I can say with confidence: your Flash web site is not helping your business. Strong words, perhaps, but Flash is good for a very specific set of things, and your business web site is not one of them. These are just a few reasons why you should think twice before building a Flash site, or move your existing site out of Flash:

Search engines won’t play nicely with your web site.

Web sites that are fully built in Flash don’t get indexed well by search engines. Google and other search engines are primed to look for relevant content, and their indexing bots can’t make heads or tails of Flash code, so even if your Flash site is full of lovingly written and 100% relevant content, search engines may not be able to see it!

Unless all of the text in your Flash site is actual Text, and not an Image, search engine crawlers can’t see what you’ve written. That means you won’t be able rise in the ranks on search engines, and you’ll be missing out on a lot of potential clients.

Flash sites are more expensive to build, and a pain to maintain!

Flash development is an entirely separate skill from building a regular web site, and doing things that are simple in HTML or PHP can be massively more time-consuming to do in Flash. That means you’re spending more to build the same site, and that’s a big deal for a small business!

Even if your Flash site is already built, how often are you able to update it? Do you have to chase down your web developer every time you want to make a copy change? Are you able to maintain a blog within your web site? Flash web sites are incredibly limiting for a small business owner, and if you want to update and change your site as your business evolves, and you definitely won’t be able to do that on your own.

Animated Flash intros may seem fancy, but they’re actually boring!

Think about it: when was the last time you actually sat through a Flash intro on a business web site? You probably clicked that “Skip” button after a couple of seconds, right? One of the best things about the Internet is its interactivity–people get to look for interesting things, communicate with each other, buy things, etc. All a Flash intro requires you to do is sit there and endure an animated sideshow that’s getting between you and the information you want. Why not save your clients the extra click, and make their user experience better?

Flash makes it harder to share your content.

If you’ve ever visited a web site that’s built in Flash, you might have noticed that, if you bookmark something, the bookmark will take you to the opening page, not the specific content you wanted! If your business site is built in Flash, they’ll have the same problem.

And even worse, if there’s a page in your Flash site that your visitors want to share with a friend, or on Facebook, all of those friends who click on it? They’ll be dumped out on the homepage, too. All of those people who could’ve been impressed by your amazing new fascinator design may not ever see it, because they’ll have to look through your entire web site to find it–or more likely, they’ll get frustrated and move on. Word-of-mouth via Internet is powerful, and it costs you no time or money, so you don’t want to short yourself on that!

If you want to build a web site that’s as awesome as your work is,–and not in Flash!–I specialize in building web sites for small and local businesses that look fantastic, get found by search engines, and that you can maintain and update without having to stare at scary blocks of code. Contact me about your web site project, and let’s talk about what we can do together.

Portland web design – Portland logo design – Upswept Creative