subject: Why You Should Think Twice About Using A Flash Website - Tips From Professional Calgary Web Design [print this page] Why You Should Think Twice About Using A Flash Website - Tips From Professional Calgary Web Design
Flash has been around for years now and the technology gets better and better each year. Being in the web design business we run into a lot of people who want a site built in flash. Aside from making your site look professional and fancy, flash comes with a few drawbacks.
Number one, it's expensive, VERY expensive! At any regular firm, a modest flash web design could start at $10,000 an upwards. This doesn't include extra graphics and logo design. Low budget or small business usually can't afford this kind of bill, especially when there are other, more productive ways to spend that money.
Number two, search engines can't crawel flash pages, meaning your site is as un-SEO friendly as it could possibly get. Search engines can onlycrawlHTML, PDF and a number of other documents, but not flash. Soliterally, whatever is on the flash portion of your page(not including page titles you see on the very top of your browser), will NOT be taken into account by the search engines. This is a massive blow to your search engine rankings, something you don't want to sacrifice, no matter how nighbudgetand flashy your site looks. If not a whole lot of visitors reach your page, the design really doesn't matter as much. SEO is important. The difference between bad Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and great SEO is huge! Depending on how much business you reach online, SEO meansthousands of dollars of profits (even hundreds of thousands) for your business.
We work with a large number of clients and discourrage them from using flash whenever we get the chance. The problem is not only that we'd have to charge our clients an astronomical rate to build the site but, in the process, their search engine rankings would be suffering dramatically. Until Google, Yahoo and other major search engines can improve their technology to the point of reading flash sites, we recomend sticking with the good old fashion HTML pages. Until then, it's not worth our time and it's probably not worth your time either.
