Is it business suicide to build a entire website in Flash?

Question

My website will be basically selling services; will my SEO ranking still be affected if I embed the Flash site in a blank html page? I am at that critical point where I am ready to upload the site but I am just having second thoughts about the ease of doing business with Flash. Thanks.

Answer 1

Whether or not it's business suicide depends on how much of your revenue is dependent on getting referrals from search engines. Your search engine ranking will certainly be affected if you have an HTML page in which you simply embed some flash.

Could you implement an alternative more static site, by scraping the main content from your flash?

Answer 2

Search engine crawlers can't crawl flash sites, so your SEO rankings will be based off the non-flash part (the blank html page). Personally, I also don't really like the user experience of a flash-only site.

Answer 3

Ignoring the SEO implications of an all-Flash site, unless you're building games, or I have an extremely strong desire to buy what you're selling, I will turn back immediately if I find a website built entirely out of Flash.

Nothing against your programming skill; I just have rarely seen such a site give me what I want. The name is often apropos.

Answer 4

Yes..............

Answer 5

all web applications should be made from the point of view of accessibility, no matter what the scripting language used at the time. If you use a nice script like SWFObject then you can populate your page with "alternative content" to the flash page which the search engines will crawl. this will also allow any browser that doesnt have flash to have a look at the website, even if you dont make the whole thing as "pretty" in HTML.

two birds as they say.

Answer 6

I don't know whether you've considered this or not, or whether it applies to your circumstances, but you might lose out on business from the visually impaired. Unless I'm mistaken, I don't think there are any screen readers that operate on Flash.

Answer 7

It can certainly be done well. I've seen some pretty cool Flash-powered stuff being run by some pretty big-name companies, do a search for HP's Photosmart page for instance.

Look: there's a lot of information out there about Flash and SEO, and much of it is out of date. Google rolled out "official" flash support about a year ago, and they've been refining it ever since. Google will index your Flash site, but exactly what gets indexed is a bit of a black box so it always helps to have HTML alt-copy.

Never, ever build a full-flash website without using SWFObject for embeds and always try to use SWFAddress to enable Flash Deep-linking. There are ways to make this work and work well - a lot of people don't know that and have a deep-seated hatred of all things Flash because they were irritated by Splash pages in 2002. There's nothing to be done about them.

But if you want to use Flash, go for it - just do a lot of homework and test your work.

Answer 8

I think it depends on what kind of business we are talking about.

For most, I would say don't do it!

But there are ome kinds of sites where I think it is appropriate, if done very well. For example if you are in the business of art or design, or are showcasing a product/service where art or design is key.

As an example:

Volkswagon's GTI Project (a large part of what cars are about is design)

Answer 9

You won't get any business from me.

Nothing says 'amateur' on the web like pointless Flash.

Answer 10

Google and Yahoo! have added flash crawling functionality to their engines recently.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.html

From a SEO perspective you're fine on that front. Still..your page will need a DOC TYPE, Page Title, etc to remain SEO compliant.

IF your target market is users browsing your site from a laptop or desktop you should be fine. You may want to include a flash-free option for users accessing your site on a mobile phone or with javascript/flash disabled.

For example, You can run a browser sniffer to redirect any user agents accessing the page on Safari via an iPhone OS.

Other than that Flash does offer some nice flair to a site. If you can give alternatives to users that don't like the application then I say do it.

Answer 11

Flash has fallen out of favour the last few years with a lot of people. Initially it was because search engines didn't crawl it but these days it's mainly because 'flashy' effects can be done with javascript engines like jquery, scriptaculous or mootools.

Having said that I can tell you that nearly every business customer I go to still wants flash on their site and most casual web users don't give two hoots what a site is built like as long as it works, is fast (something kinda tricky to do with flash) and is what they want to look at.

I say go for it and see how the site does! I'm sure if you use analytics for a few weeks you will know whether your site is doing well or not.

Best of luck with it :)

Answer 12

Ok so first of all, perspective, my primary domain is Flash and system architecture, I and the company that I work for at present are all about creating online 'digital experiences', engaging online content.

This is NOT applicable to selling services, e-commerce, and general information based sites, as much as it pains me to say that. There is current a massive backlash against flash due to the arrival of javascript effects and the canvas tag, I'm going to be bold here and say that anyone who thinks they can replace x years of plugin development and and media experience by giving html/javascript devs a div they can draw into are simply misguided (and you can show me all the chrome experiments you want but its still not going to be pixel bender or native 3D support).

So with that said, in this climate you've got to play to each formats strengths, you want slick, stylised SEO'd content that is accessible and concise, html with progressively enhanced javascript is a no brainer. You want a web app that people can use easily, search and build a micro-community around then googles GWT (other js frameworks are available) is the way to go. For everything in-between and beyond theres Flash.

I'm not giving Flash a kicking (it's my lively-hood after all), far from it, in fact I'm actively encouraging people to use Flash only for the kind a digital master-pieces it was made for, if you can do it in HTML, why would you do it in Flash? Sure in most cases it actually works out lighter than JS, and it's cross-browser compatible, but these are small issues that will only be ironed out in time, HTML was designed for the web, Flash was designed as a plugin.

In coming years we will see Flash on a multitude of devices with the open-screen project and the iphone-flash cross compiling, it is becoming a platform for multimedia development in general, where-as the web is becoming more service orientated platform, web apps running off searchable indexed content in the cloud. If your website is intended for the web, then make it for the web.

(Just realised that this was a bit of a rant, apologies)

Answer 13

If you created a web site with Flash, user will not be able to use basic browser functions and extensions such as searching, spell checking, sharing a particular page via Twitter, etc.... (And cannot access from iPhone.)

Answer 14

Depends on the site in question. If its just displaying marketing collateral or case-studies then a "flashy display" would be fine. Have seen couple of such websites in the past and the better ones have impressed me.

You should also consider how frequently content would change and how it impacts your design in Flash vs say design in html. The search engine ranking aspect also will matter.

Answer 15

For some reason Motorola made their new Droid site all in Flash. This is a good article about how dreadful it is, and the drawbacks:

newmedia article

There are a ton of good reasons to use Flash sparingly. It's good for what it does well and dreadful for entire sites.