It may be considered as a child’s play to increase the number of visitors to a website today. Considering how the search engines are strategically optimized these days, it is fairly easy to get gobs of visitors instantly to a new website.

The real difficulty is what you should do to make visitors stay once they visit your website. It is also essential to make them return to your website and be your loyal customers.

The web design plays a deciding role here. Besides being user-friendly, a successful web design should also be appealing. To create an appealing web design is much more difficult than to achieve a user-friendly one.

As flash animation comes along in website design, creating an appealing website is no longer that difficult. Making the web page look more appealing is not the only merit you get from flash animated websites. Read on to find out the 3 most striking benefits if you employ flash animations in web design.

1. The drawback of websites designed with flash animations is that they are being crawled by search engine bots. Many people are grateful since search engines have already improved their algorithms and no longer leave out flash animations these days. Search results in Google now include flash animated websites. These websites will soon be favored by all major search engines, as prognosticated by experts in search engine optimization. It is therefore now the right time to design websites using flash animations.

2. If your websites are full of motionless images and texts which cannot interact with the visitors, the visitors will mostly go away as they can do nothing except gaze at the web page. With flash animations, you can get input and interaction from the visitors. This can entertain them and make them stay longer.

3. The number of websites available is incalculable, therefore it’s essential to stand out from the crowd in order to be noted. Notice how many websites nowadays still have not integrated flash animations, and most of them look lethargic with text and still images only. Make a faster move to include flash animations in order to have a vivacious website and be distinct.

Do not worry about creating your own flash animated websites, there are a lot of design templates for flash animated websites offered by professional web design companies. Customization of the ready-made website is also possible. Just choose a template that matches your requirement.

Adobe, which is famous for its image and video editing softwares, is also the company that offers the Flash technology. Flash is utilized in millions of websites and it is the technology that enables videos to be viewed online.

Flash is now moving on to the TV screen. This is to be made public in the forthcoming National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, according to a report in the New York Times.

This extension is beneficial to the users as they can enjoy the same videos not only on their PCs or phones but also on TV screens. As Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen expected, televisions and set top boxes which support the Flash format may probably be launched into the US market at a later time in 2009.

Bud Albers, the CTO of Disney, showed his company’s support to Flash on the TV by saying “Coming generations of consumers clearly expect to get their content wherever they want on it, on any device, when they want it. This gets us where we want to go.”

Apart from the users, Adobe benefits the most from the extension. In 2008, Adobe reported an income of $871.8 million and a revenue of $3.6 million. It is making a huge profit from Flash by selling Flash application building software as well as video building software to media creators. It is not surprising that Flash can be found on nearly all computers and Flash users watch 80% of web videos by using this technology.

Microsoft, who is determined to fight for its share in this particular market, launches Silverlight. Microsoft argued that Silverlight should be a better choice compared to Flash when it comes to HD 1080p video contents.

Microsoft commented that HD capability would become the mainstream format for videos in the future. Brad Becker from Microsoft (who is a former executive of Adobe) said he “can’t imagine what could be more important on a television than high video quality.”

Adobe Flash, having almost no direct competitor for years, finally faces some challenges as Microsoft joins the competition of bridging the gap between computers and televisions with the introduction of Silverlight.

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.