Don't Cripple your Website with Flash
As you might imagine, I come across all sorts of websites every single day. The ones that drives me crazy the most are the kinds of websites that are complete flash websites.
Why?
1998
Let me backtrack a little. In 1998, Flash was getting popular. Very popular. It was seen as the "New Media." Designers could do quite a bit with it. In fact you could create just about anything with Macromedia Flash. The problem was... everybody did. We all (yes I'm guilty of it too) created sites that included all sorts of crazy animations and were basically commercials. And they were HEAVY. Meaning that they were very big.
If you rember in 1998 (right before the dot-com bubble burst), people were just starting to get broadband. So the designers were finally given carte-blanche to design "Cutting Edge Websites."
All sorts of problems ensued. Websites were created that were 20mb downloads (they didn't start before the flash movie was mostly downloaded or wholely downloaded), people with disabilities couldn't navigate much less read the sites, and did I mention most flash websites were obnoxious?
2001
Designers and clients finally started to get wise to the problems with having flash-heavy websites, much less an entire site designed in Flash. So we all started scaling things back a bit to eventually not using Flash. In fact around 1999 the WAI was formed and the idea of Accessibility on the Web started to catch on. Flash of course isn't really accessible.
2008
Skip to 2008. Common web design practices steer away from the use of Flash. But not completely. We still use Flash (sparingly) but never in navigation (Google can't crawl flash movies) and NEVER, NEVER as an entire website for the main same reason.
Then What's the Rub, Bub?
So back to the original post. I come across entire Flash websites and it drives me nuts. This, in my opinion, just cripples that website. It drives away search engines because they can't crawl it and gather the information from the site. So if the client's main objective is to get ranked number one on Google, then I hate to say that it's just never going to happen.
Websites need to actually do something other than look great. They should be comprised of a LOT of text because that's what the search engines understand. And what happens when a site is viewed on something like a Backberry or iPhone? At least with a text-based website, you can style it with another stylesheet. With Flash, you're stuck.
And what happens when you want to update the website? You can't imagine how many new clients have come to us to do a simple text update in a Flash-based website and I have to tell them sorry because they don't have the original .fla file.
In summary, designers and website owners... use Flash sparingly. Use it in place of an image to add interactivity to a site. Don't use Flash Navigation. Don't create an entire website in Flash. Just because you CAN use Flash doesn't mean you SHOULD.
Chris Hunter is a Co-Owner of Web Unlimited - a Texas based Web Design Firm that specializes in creating small business websites that actually work. Read more about Chris here.