The question is often raised during meetings with managers and business top dogs: Is it alright to have a flash animated web site? How do we use Adobe Flash properly to build a web site?
Just to give everyone an overview of what exactly Flash does. Flash is a software which enable web creators to add in interactive components to their sites, such as animation and graphics. It is used extensively in demonstrating products and training programs. If you choose to build your web site completely out of Flash, there is however the possibility, that Google would not be able to ‘index’ these sites and listing them way below the normal HTML sites.
Search engines utilize a process called “indexing” when ranking websites. The content inside a website is said to be “indexable” if the text (i.e. content) on the web page can be highlighted when you point your mouse to the text and left-click it. If the text can be highlighted, it means that the text can be separated in different “layers” with other graphics within the page and search engines like Google would be able to “index” the content based on the text.
When Flash is used to build a web site, the text will be put into different layers as photos or graphics. This make it difficult for Google to index the page. Google needs to be able to read the web site and look for information so that they can put the web page under a certain keyword searching database system. Indexing is therefore extremely vital.
Google and Adobe Flash used to be absolutely incompatible. There have be attempts of collaboration between the two companies to solve the indexing problem, but none of the testing results, whether successful or not, are yet to be found. It can be appealing to many since Flash does make a web page layout look more attractive, but there is a reason why a lot of people still stick to text-based content up till now.
Even though most people cannot resist the attractive appearance and the usefulness of Flash websites, these websites post a needless obstruction to Google as Google mainly seeks for text-based content.
In order to solve the above problem, some websites simply offer users with two versions of their websites, one in HTML and the other in Flash. Although this approach solves the problem of Google not being able to read Flash content, the website owner would then have to manage two web sites when actually one will do.
So how to use Flash within web pages properly? You should develop a compromise between web design, usefulness and search engine optimization. The best way is to integrate Flash files within the entire HTML site design. Then your text-based content can be indexed by Google. On the other hand, your Flash-based content can attract visitors to your site. This can tackle the problem of indexing and make good use of Flash at the same time.
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