Flash is pure, unadulterated evil to your business and it has little to no place in your website design plans. It is evil because it loses your company money. Keep reading to see how and how to fix it.
Flash is to Website Design as ex-Girlfriend’s Name is to Tattoo
As a leading website design company in Charlotte, we get a lot of requests for website designs built with Adobe Flash. We get nearly as many requests to remove Flash from small business websites. It could be that Flash is the website designer’s equivalent of tattooing your high school girlfriend’s name on your arm. It might make sense at the time, you think you’ll have it forever, but very soon you want it gone and to never return.
What is a Flash Design?
A Flash Website is a very pretty, very dynamic website built with specialized web development software. At first glance it looks great. Unfortunately after a bit of usage it begins to grate on you.
A great quote by SEOResearcher illustrates Flash beautifully:
Then why are there so many Flash sites? They look pretty with all those neat vector graphics, gradients, animations and cool sound effects. Flash is the favorite toy of big designer studios and numerous amateur graphic artists alike. Flash is visually attractive, and in general attractive websites are more successful than the ugly ones (notable exceptions: craigslist.org and plentyoffish.com). But this is not the case of Flash websites. All the benefits of the nice outlook are overridden by the disadvantages in terms of SEO and usability.
How a Flash Website Design Loses you Money.
Here’s a list of reasons not to use a Flash Website Design:
Business Issues
- Search Engines ignore Flash! If you want great organic search engine results, Flash is not the way to go. The webcrawlers like Google and Yahoo that evaluate the information on your site literally cannot ’see’ the information in a Flash-designed website. With search engines referring so much business these days you cannot afford to have them ignore your website!
Usability Issues
- Flash takes over your browser. You can only go where the designers let you. The Back button does not work in flash.
- Visited Links do not work. You know when you visit a website and click around on a bunch of different links the ones you have already clicked on are a different color? That doesn’t work in Flash. Flash uses an entirely different technology than the HTML your web browser displays.
- Useless for users with disabilities. A competent HTML designer can easily create a website that is useful for users with many types of hearing and visual impairments. Flash does not give you that capability.
- Internal Search does not work for Flash pages. What good is content on your site if people can’t find it?
- Flash gets old very quickly. While it might look cool to have all of those graphics on the splash page the user sees when they come to your site, by the second visit it is annoying.
- Users need proprietary plug ins.
“If the user hasn´t installed the plug-in (which many don´t) then at best, their experience is diminished, at worst, the site doesn´t work at all. Web sites should not force the user into using any proprietary systems.” – Inspired eBusiness
Maintenace Issues
- A web designer is needed to redo the entire site every time you want to update Flash. If you have a Content Management System, you can update the content yourself. Updating flash to keep current with your business takes time, money and resources that are better spent on your business.
- Flash takes bandwidth. All of those nifty graphics take a lot of space and bandwidth to send to your potential clients. What if they are using dialup or have a slow connection? Do you think they will wait around for the sit to come up or will they just go to your competitor?
Design Abuse
- Animation for the sake of animation? Just because you can animate something, should you animate it?
- Security Issues. Flash is an application that is vulnerable to hacker attacks.
And it is not only me. Some of the best website designers, search engine optimization specialists, and internet marketers are against Flash. I borrowed heavily from the following excellent articles:
- Flash is Evil: 5 Big Reasons not to use Flash
- Search Engine Journal basically echos SEOResearcher’s 5 points here.
- Belfast Website Designer, Inspired EBusiness
- Tailored Website Design: Top 10 Mistakes on the Web
If those are not enough, check out the following Flash criticisms in Wikipedia.
In Summary:
Jakob Nielsen, a web usability expert, a said it best in the following quote:
“Although multimedia has its role on the Web, current Flash technology tends to discourage usability for three reasons: it makes bad design more likely, it breaks with the Web’s fundamental interaction style, and it consumes resources that would be better spent enhancing a site’s core value.”
And if your Charlotte-area website designer insists on using Flash? Well, take Brendon Sinclair’s advice:
If your designer suggests the use of Flash on your web site, get rid of him. Using Flash is a huge mistake.
After you get rid of them, give Charlotte Web Development a call and we’ll build you a great site that you can be proud of AND makes your business money.
Related Reading:
- Web Design of Charlotte’s CPCC Program
- Use Your Competitors to Build a Better Website
- 5 Navigation Website Design Errors
- Mapping Your Way to Web Site Search Engine Optimization
- Web Design Errors: Technology Edition
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi, I’m Hank Allison. I need an e-commerce website to sell custom- printed and framed and museum shipped art photos worldwide.
The site will have a page about me that will be extremely rich with audio clips , video news stories and still photos etc etc etc from 1965 in Vietnam through today. In between I have managed to be a soldier, learn photography from the cadre of pulitzer prize winning photogs who were in ‘Nam at that time, come home somehow alive, become a newspaper reporter then a radio newswriter and reporter and then a TV reporter ranch beef cattle get a degree in clinical psych a law degree and pass the tn bar and become a courtroom trial lawyer. That is a rough outline. There is much more. I have previously only told much of this to close friends, because unless they “see” my photo in the book “Helter Skelter” and the inscription…..To Hank,
Thanks for your great coverage of the Manson Trial. Vince Bugliosi” (for starters) people are inclined to disbelieve my “Forrest Gump with Brains” story. The idea of this page or pages will be to blow everyone’s mind when they get directed to my site by the zillions of links this media will provide.
We are also going to have free videos of all sorts of art critics, photography curators, artists in all media except performing, interior designers etc etc etc all talking about their specialty and giving helpful information to the viewer who has selected to view this content. We will acquire this content for free…..b/c the makers will have a “soccer game” type logo in the upper corner of the picture with a world-wide 800 number and postal address to promote themselves to be reciprocally contacted by unique viewers to my site and these videos. Intend to have at least 2-300 videos within a year.
I am going to try to attach a smattering of randomly chosen, sized images from my very large library of scanned color slides and digital images so you’ll have an idea of the breadth and quality of what we’ll be selling to a very, very high-end $$$$ market. People who pay Rolex prices expect a Rolex experience and I intend to provide it.!!! If they’ve got the money honey, I’ve got the product and the spectacular service and from the instantly, “most interesting photographer in the world”. The market I am targeting wants a good yarn to tell about the striking ($3,500 –with frame, avg. price) photo on their wall ,other than, Oh, he is a really good photographer in Nashville, TN!!!” And I intend to provide a yarn that they can tell and then when their friends say…..”stop bs-ing me.” give them my URL http://www.HankAllisonPhotos.com and tell them to see for themselves. Oh……and did I mention that since I haven’t a lot of money to spend———-what with three kids with graduate degrees, an ex wife, a wonderful new wife and multiple physical calamities (my survival of those alone could be the front page of another “believe it or not ” website)———–I will be wanting to do this with an “eye on the meter” and good pre planning and with me doing as much as I can to prepare the media content that it will come to you pre-fab to be simply “plugged in.”
Send me some feedback and urls of as many relevant great sites you’ve done for others as you can ASAP!!!!!!!. My cell is 615-715-6460. Thanks, Hank Allison
You should really remove this article, it’s very stupid for 2009. Most points were true in 2007, and some were plain stupid even then.
Sorry you disagree, Chris. Would you care to share your specific concerns? From Charlotte Web Development’s point of view (and our clients), Flash is simply useless for small business. This contention can be backed up by data – visitors to sales. I’d love to hear your contrary thoughts, though.