5 Reasons to Think Twice Before Buying A Flash Website

Adobe Flash - commonly referred to as simply Flash - is a common platform designed to deliver rich Internet content through the browser. "Rich content" are things beyond basic text - animations, video, music, simple applications and games, and so on. The nature of Flash also lends itself to easily creating complex, interesting and "cool" Websites.

Unfortunately, that cool website might have serious implications if it's your face to the world on the Internet. This article discusses 5 major reasons to consider alternatives to Flash.

1. Search engines can’t read it

Despite recent advances, search engines in general have a very hard time reading and understanding Flash websites. More importantly, they don’t bother to try unless they think your site is important. If your site is not fully indexed by the search engines, you’re giving up a lot of potential visitors – which means a lot of potential clients.

About a year ago, I was talking to a potential client about building a website for a small business. All I knew about the project at the proposal stage was the name of the company. I did some searches on Google and Yahoo! for the exact company name, and the only results it turned up were news articles. Think about the implications of that for your website, just for a minute.

The reason I couldn’t find it is because it was done completely in Flash, so the search engines had no idea what the site was about. Normally, an exact match on the domain name is good enough for the top ranking – or at least top 5 – but this site was on the third page of results for that exact match. The website might as well not exist, because the only people that will ever find it are those that already know the address and type it in.

A side effect of this is screen readers for the visually impaired can’t read the sites any better than a search engine can, which has implications for accessibility, especially in an aging society.

2. Takes a long time to download

Most Flash websites are contained all in one file. The text, video, images, sounds and animations are all jammed in together. That means, in order to display the first page of your site, everything needs to be downloaded. Contrast to a standard website, which only downloads what you’re showing at a given time. Why is this a “bad thing”? Because your big Flash website is slow to load, and people are impatient. You’ve got between 5 & 10 seconds to get somebody’s interest on the Internet, before they’re gone, and once they’re gone, they are unlikely to ever come back. You want that time spent looking at your content, not a progress bar.

3. Can’t bookmark pages

Imagine that you've found a Flash website that contains a product you like and want to buy. Before you buy it, you want to make sure your (wife/husband/insert other decision maker in your life here) also likes it. You look at the menu bar and see "www.thiswebsite.com". You send them the link which takes them to the home page, and then you need to remember how to find the product, and explain it to them. What are the odds that's going to work out?

Now, imagine that was your product, and your customer that just gave up because it was too hard.

Flash websites create their own little sandbox in the browser, and they don't play nicely with anything outside there. So, unlike a normal website, they don't change addresses when you change content. Bookmarking - and it's ideological cousin, direct linking - are very important parts of the experience of using the Internet. If you take the ability to do those two things away, you're taking a big part of the experience away from your visitors.

Worse than that, they can't find the pretty purple widget they wanted to buy from you, because they stumbled on it by accident, and can't get their way back.

4. Hard to Navigate

This is related to the above point, but looks at it from a slightly different angle. People are used to certain ways of navigating websites, such as tabs along the top of the page to navigate among sections, or lists on the left or right sidebar with places to go, and differently coloured and/or underlined text within content for links to different places.

Flash websites often - though not always - break these metaphors, because it's very easy to create something "cool" and different to navigate. The downside to cool, especially with navigation, is it's not obvious to visitors how to use it, and nothing makes people feel stupid like not being able to figure out how to get to your product list. And if you make your customers feel stupid, they're not going to feel like spending money.

The other factor to consider with navigation systems - you don't want visitors to have to think about how to get around. You want them thinking about how great your products are and how they need those products solve their problems. Once they have to step outside of that zone, you've lost them, and may not ever get them back.

5. Hard to change

The final point I want to make here really has nothing to do with your visitors, and everything to do with your pocketbook. Flash websites have to be edited in a special application, and then rebuilt and reloaded. This can be a time consuming process, it can be hard - depending on the change - and the application isn't cheap. All things considered, most people are going to go back to their programmer to make the changes, and have to pay.

Contrast that with something like a Content Management System (CMS) which allows you to easily edit, add or remove pages in a simple user interface, similar to a Word processor, without a Programmer or Web Designer getting involved. Your ongoing maintenance costs with a Flash website are going to be much higher than with a CMS, or even a static HTML website.

What IS Flash for?

I know what some of you are thinking right now – what is Flash for, then? It really has two killer applications for a business Website:

1. Adding Interactivity to Websites in small doses
2. Video delivery

What sort of Interactivity do I mean? Animated menus (but only if you offer text alternatives), nicer forms or small applications. Flash is an animation engine, that was stretched to make Websites because it’s easier to layout than HTML. Any problems around it are related to forcing it to do something it wasn’t intended to do.

If you’re still not convinced, my next post will be some guidelines to help you build better Flash websites.