Some clients ask us to build their websites in Flash or we are asked sometimes to create a Flash intro on homepage with a “Skip / Enter” button, our answer comes quickly “Sorry, we don’t support Flash websites or Flash intros”.
We only use Flash to show rich media content like online video or online animated advertisements, for these example, we recommend Flash technologies.
But why we don’t use Flash generally at Mitch Designs to generate content or intros, let me explain in the following points:
1- Flash is not working on mobile devices
If one of your clients wants to use his iPhone or iPad to check your website while he is in a restaurant or in his car to know more about your services and what does your business provides, he will get a blank page and will never see your Flash presentation with all the fantasy designed transitions effects and the cool background music.
It is like you are saying to your client “Sorry we can not serve you with the information you asked for, unless you change your mobile”.
I know that not everybody using iPhone, but we can ignore that there is a significant number of people that do, with more mobile devices appear in the market which does not support Flash technology, your website should be in HTML / CSS layout and a minimal JavaScript animation.
2- Google and Flash are not friends
When it comes to a very important term in the web industry SEO “Search Engine Optimization”; Flashy content is not SEO friendly at all.
According to Google algorithms, the search engine robots can not read text or images alternative text inside a Flash movie, instead they read strange symbols and numbers, but not your keywords, which doesn’t help your website to be indexed on Google database, means no ranking on search result pages.
If you have a Flash introduction presentation on your website homepage with a “Skip” or “Enter” button, you simply lose the opportunity that Google robots be able to index your major business keywords from the most important landing page on your website which is “The Homepage”, instead they index the keyword “Skip” or “Enter” which they are exist more than Trillion times on the web.
Because of this, we don’t recommend to use Flash intro movies or Flash content, it is the same like you put your valuable text keywords in an iron box and kicked Google away from catching them.
3- Flash is too slow
This fact is obvious to many, Flash requires too much bandwidth to be fully loaded on your visitor`s computer. Here are the two problems:
One, you force your users to wait for long time until the fancy loading bar is completed to show them your content in a very attractive way but in the other hand they get bored, specially with the fact that 15% of the total online users still use dial-up or low 2G / 3G network.
According to Google analytics reports, the visitors bounce rate is very high on Flash pages, because visitors don’t want to wait, there are other websites offer the same services like you do and never ask them to wait that much.
Two, Google algorithms are very restricted when it comes to page loading speed. If we assume that your users will wait to see how fancy the animation looks, but Google robots will not wait to read your unreachable content, they will simply drop you off.
4- Flash is not that easy to be updated
Most of the popular CMS “Content Management Systems” and even our commercial CMS at Mitch Designs, can not edit text or manage dynamic content located Flash movies. So every time you need to change an article title or a text paragraph you need to call your web designer to do it for you, on the other hand if your website is built by HTML / CSS and is controlled by CMS, you can do that in seconds from your control panel.
5- Flash is not a web standards, it is a company product
Five years ago when the web standards were not that important in our development life style like nowadays, and before SEO term became a default procedure when we build a website; Adobe Flash was rocking on the web, with it’s awesome flexibility and cool design options and the obvious appealing, people thought it is a web standard technology, but the reality now says (IT IS NOT), it is a company product, which has it’s limitation specially with security issues. On the other side HTML 4 & 5, CSS 2.1 & 3 and Java Script are web standards.
Because of the above reasons, we drop Flash technology from our daily development process at our agency, we don’t believe that Flash is the best technology for web communications, we prefer to use friendly alternative options which give us smooth animation effects which assist the content itself, rather than un-useful animation effects not related to the website goal. We depends on JavaScrip and its cool libraries (Example: JQuery) to achieve these effects.