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Flash Only Sites - Yea or Nay?

Here’s fun argument to mull over.

It used to be that the SEO experts all ranted against flash only sites because they couldn’t be indexed by Google. Not so anymore. Google can pull text and links from your rich media files. It’s much harder to pull off any optimization in a flash file, but at least now flash sites aren’t left in the dust. So why all the fuss about flash?

There are multiple problems with flash only sites:

1. Not everyone has flash. Requiring people to download something just to view your site will most likely cause them to go elsewhere.
2. Visually impaired people will find your site useless.
3. No one likes waiting around for 60 seconds for your page to load. The internet is vast, if your page doesn’t hold the a users attention immediately, they will find another site.
4. Navigating in flash is unfamiliar to many users. The “back” button on the browser no longer works and unless you have a perfect menu built into your site, many users will give up and find a text based site.

In addition, flash is not longer “cutting edge” technology. It’s not “cool” or “edgy” to have a flash only site anymore.

This DOES NOT mean that you can’t have any flash elements on your page. Flash can be used to seamlessly integrate video, music, image galleries and lots of other interesting multi-media files. Flash can display many of the things that text can’t, but it can’t replace text based sites.

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