Attractive Flash Web Sites

A lot of businesses use Adobe Flash when they create their company websites but only a few of them know how to use Flash in a proper way. So what are the points that one should pay attention to when creating a website using Flash?

Flash is a software for creating graphic-based animation that can help a website become richer and more interactive. Flash is a great tool for creating online training modules, product demonstrations and other types of contents that require interaction. However, one major drawback of Flash is that search engines, including Google, cannot understand the contents of the website if it is all written using Flash. As a result, the search engine’s ranking of such a website would be greatly affected.

What is the meaning of ‘index’? When you can left-click the text on a web site and see it highlighted in blue after dragging over it, the content is classified as ‘indexable’. This is to say that the highlighted text and images or graphics of the site are located in various ‘layers’. Only then can the text-based content be indexed by search engines, such as Google.

With the help of indexing, Google can review a web page thoroughly and put the important details of the page into the database for users’ keyword searching. It is really difficult for Google to index Flash websites as they are layered into graphics and photos which cannot be indexed.

Google had no way to index the content of Flash websites in the past. However, Google and Adobe are working together to make indexing Flash websites possible, although no testing results have been announced yet. For this reason, it is better for you to use text-based content and prevent using Flash within web pages.

It is indeed undeniable that Flash is one of the best design tools when it comes down to the appearance of a website. It is also user-friendly in many ways. What we cannot change is that Google still has problems reading Flash contents and this is obstructive for the search engine to work optimally.

There are business owners who decide to go both ways, just in case. These web pages let users choose between ‘HTML Site’ or ‘Flash Web Site’ from the Home Page. Naturally, that is one of the ways to compromise with Google’s system, but the workload of managing two web sites at the same time can be unbearable for some of the business owners and their teams.

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.