Although there are evidence to show about, like my personal flash blog, swfobject (suggested by google), Flash SEO practices, flash frameworks, my own personal CMS flash solution, etc., I wouldn’t like to abuse this blog by monopolizing my opinion.

Although it seams that flash sites are not your specialty, you might benefit to update your information background about them.

Since this blog is leaving an open door to the other side of your opinion, thank you for the hospitality.

regards,
Ted.

While the video is great, that is not all that a small business website should be. From a usability standpoint, contact information, FAQs, and humanizing elements (owner’s picture, telephone number, blog, FAQs etc) should be present and easily navigable and bookmark-able. Flash does not provide this. Poor user experience = poor conversions.

Secondly, Flash is not very accommodating for SEO. Google can only index things in the flash descriptive files provided unlike HTML based pages that are easy to optimize and index. Poor SEO = poor traffic = poor business results.

Thirdly, Flash is difficult for non-developers to update. I offer a CMS solution where my customers do not have to know anything about programming. They just log in, type away on a MS Word-like interface and press submit. Viola! Their site is updated in seconds. With a Flash site they would have to track down and pay a developer.

Forth, aside from interactive games, Flash sites are not as useful for business clients to interact with. Blogs and comment interactions – like this one – would be impossible on a pure flash page.

Fifth, try creating an e-commerce site in Flash. It would be possible in Flex, but even many large businesses do not have the technology teams necessary to support such an effort.

Sixth, interoperability. Flash does not play on my iPhone nor my clients blackberrys. When I design sites, they must be accessible on a multitude of devices and browsers. Also, Flash does not render at all for users with disabilities. That is a legal liability issue for many of my clients. With Flash they could be sued for discrimination.

I can go on all day. In the end, Flash has its place – especially in the Flex framework – but small business websites is not it. I do agree that elements of a html-based CMS could benefit from embedded Flash, but they can also benefit from many other embedded technologies, too, and I wouldn’t make a CMS based on them either.

However, my clients are small to medium sized businesses without hundreds of thousands to spend on advertising that will not bring results. They need the basics that will attract visitors and convert them to paying clients.

First of all, for the sake of the common sense, we should both agree that the large-scale companies don’t spend their money on promoting ideas, without ensuring that will bring results. They have invested a lot in order to be always able to identify their true promoting needs.

In my last post, I have indicated a couple of expensive sites in order to identify the effectiveness of a flash site compared with html site.
However, flash sites are not necessary expensive. There are also much cheaper cases to show. This time, lets see a couple of much cheaper sites in the field of dental implants. Let’s identify the effectiveness of this flash site, compared with this html site.

An Internet site is rather convincing visitors to buy something or not. Internet visitors don’t care to identify the particular technology that the site is built of. The back-end technology is irrelevant to this procedure.

My point seams clear as the sunshine to me.
However, this point seams different to you. Would you mind to explain what makes you believe that Internet site (as a promoting mean), works so different than all other kind of promoting medias?
I guess you should agree that watching a video is far friendlier to follow than reading and animated graphics are far more descriptive than the static ones.

I welcome any case studies that you can show specifying a flash based site that offers both the ease of maintenance, accurate reporting capabilities, and conversions that exceed development costs.
An experienced flash developer knows exactly how to develop a flash site in order to achieve these goals. Exactly the same way as you do for the html sites you’re experienced with.
Although no one’s able to guess, I suppose Bacardi case is not easy.
But I suppose quite the opposite for the new case I have indicated before, as well as the most of issued flash sites.

Regardless of the platform we should both agree that the primary responsibility of the developer is to create a working product that satisfies the clients needs, not the programmer’s ego. Development platforms are just tools in a basket. You must select the right tool for the job. If the job is to create a profitable small business website, flash is not the tool for the job. Yet.

Every interface we meet today interacts with animated graphics. Like cell phone interfaces do, like program interfaces do, like TV commercials, trailers, news intros, and many other modern rich media experience also do.

It’s well known in advertising business, that static presentation is an obsolete way to promote something. An Internet site experience like this (flash site experience) is far more advanced than this (html site experience).
What you see is what you get. There is no mystery or tricky way that Internet works.

Writers of articles like yours are likely html site developers who are strongly denying this evolution. What you really hate is to invest on learning new things. It’s a game concerning your own interests, not your clients’.

I don’t deny that every ten flash sites I see, only one stands at the appropriate level. Nine of them are suffered more or less with some of the issues you mention in the article. But none of those issues are flash weaknesses. They are clearly developer’s omissions. This is the thing flash suffers the most today, and it’s standard for every technology ever introduced. Many years back html sites suffered also for the same kind of issues (inexperienced developers).

If someone wants to gain a quality flash site, without suffering on mentioned issues, he must first peak wisely the developer, ensuring the skills, the working background and double check the quality of the outcome at the end.