As with many of my articles and newsletters, this one is inspired by a question put to me: “Is it true that you should not have a flash web site since search engines do not recognize flash? ”
The short answer to the question is yes and no. 🙂
Search engines traditionally cannot see flash – but since Flash 4, Macromedia (the guys who make Flash) built into Flash the capability to be ‘seen’ by the engines. Today search engines like AlltheWeb.com, Lycos and Google among others can index (see into) Flash movies, but only in a limited way. As far as I can tell, the engines can only extract links from the Flash movies and not much else. Compare this to an HTML page where the search engine robots (the automated programs that search engines use to surf and catalogue the web) can read everything about the page and thus your web site will have a much better chance of appearing in the search engines.
How to use Flash and make the search engines happy
It is best to combine both HTML and Flash on the same web page to cover your bases. Flash is best at creating interactive presentations, handling video and displaying animations. HTML still renders text better than Flash, as such it is my opinion that if your web sites’ job is to present information that will just be read by your visitors (ex: our company does x-y-z), I would then stick to HTML. In the end content is king; an animation is not going to keep them coming back, good content will!
If your not convinced, check out www.macromedia.com , even they combine HTML and Flash on their own pages.
About the Author:
This week’s article was written by Stefan Mischook of Killersites.com. KillerSites.com, the official website to David Siegels book ‘Creating Killer Web Sites’*. In addition to the classic web site, killersites.com now has a web site designers forum, newsletter and many new articles! Killersites.com is now more than ever, a web designers resource on creating web sites and database driven web applications.
Stefan Mischook has been developing web sites and web applications since 1994. Stefan has spent the last several years working on dozens of web and multimedia projects for small business and large pharmaceutical and banking organizations. Along with contract work, Stefan now runs the popular web sites www.killersites.com and www.how-to-build-websites.com writing concise to the point articles with the aim of teaching people real-world web design skills.
