Surprise, surprise, just last week I got a complaint from my client’s technical guy. He’s actually just another Flash Basher. Here I quote word by word what he said in the email:
A lot of developers don’t consider the downside of a flash based site which is that virtually none of the major search engines will index the site, which makes you much less visible to the world.
There’s another patronizing words from him but I quote only that paragraph. I actually already sick and tired with discussion wether Flash Is Good/Bad include the point of the way the search engine dealing with them.
But now, if it’s true that search engine cannot index full blown website, why my fullblown flash website come up at number one in google. Check this out : bnd solutions - Google Search.
Here’s what I do:
- Always put title between head tag.
- Create a “splash page”. Within this splash page put meta-keywords, and meta description. Copy the meta description as html text in your body section.
- Now it’s really depend on your creativity the way you want to create your splash page. It can be static page with some links to any plugins that going to be used in your site with enter button, or like myself, I put page redirection with flash plugins check, bypass the yada yada in the splash page.
Next point: google spider and flash content. Yes if this spider thingy will crawl into the content of your site, how bad you want your content to be indexed? Do you think it’s necessary to enable web spider if your project will only be a portfolio site?
Because, If you still want your content to be indexed, then what you need to do is just go back to meta words above,and add them there. The lesson from this point is that, you really need a good project brief before you handle any web project. Include in this good project brief is how do you want the content of your site to be indexed in search engine. From this point you will decide wether the project will be presented in Flash &/or HTML
If you want to do a content management system project, then flash is not the best thing to go. Remember, NOT that Flash is bad, it’s just because there is limittation in Flash. There is flash based CMS development until now (Theory 7), but it’s not as robust as HTML combine with server side scripting. I remember a while back there’s someone post a question in this forum here how to create discussion board in Flash. Most of the answer is “Good Luck”. Again, NOT that Flash is bad (cannot do that objective) but because this is a crazy thing to do.
HTML and Flash has different benefits toward different project. It’s your “design value” to juggle between those two things. I want you to join me to not segragate which one is better. This topics is just so tiresome and cliche. For me, beside information, (web) design is also about impression and campaign. Until today, web/screen designer dealing with limitation, and it’s a bit of “art” to combine those limitation to create near-perfect end-result. Flash will always be a good friend of mine to support that idea.
You might want to read a relevant good site I found about Jakob Nielsen (Usability “Guru”) here : Demystifying Usability . Look down to the line: How Usable is Jakob Nielsen?
Have a good day/night!
