Invision-Graphics

Author: John Melwak

Flash design has been a controversial issue among Web designers for a long time. Most designers I have spoke with either love it or hate it. It seems to be there is no in the middle here. Well, for the designers that like flash (one of them being me) things are changing - slowly changing may I add.

New products from Macromedia and new search engine technology may be shifting the way to flash. Designers are discovering that it is possible to add Flash to Web pages without sacrificing either accessibility or search engine promotion.

Let me give you some examples of using flash in a way that can compromise your design.

1. Entire site being designed in flash is a definite "NO NO" for the search engines.

2. Using flash navigation systems without having a secondary HTML navigation.

3. Large flash intro pages that have a No "Skip Intro" button.

Keeping design in mind usually what's bad for search engines is bad for actual visitors on your site.

You can design great visual effects in flash but what good is it besides it looks pretty to the search engines. The search engines cannot see all the flashy and sparkling moving images and text. What this means is that content is not being seen by the all important spiders.

Thest spiders are fed to our websites from popular search engines such as google and yahoo. Right now these spiders go through our html code and look for links to the next pages. With flash there is no html with links so the spiders cannot go to the next pages and move on to the next site. Right there your site has not been indexed and will not show in the search engines, or maybe it will, one page being the index.

This is not good as you want the search engines to index every single page on your website. After all, the more pages you have out there the better the chances of someone finding your website.

Lets move on to using flash in your design that will NOT compromise the search engine spiders.

1. Always have a "skip intro" button if you do have flash intros. I suggest not to have flash intro at all, the visitors patience if there connection is on the slower end is very low. 90% of them will move on to a new site if you intro is not up in a couple of seconds.

2. Use the accessibility features of Flash MX. I dont use flash MX anymore, there is a newer flash version out. Designers can actually add descriptive text that will be read aloud by technologies that are equipped with Flash Player 6. It helps but does not guarantee spiders will read it.

3. Try to consider using flash to enhance your web pages, instead of creating full flash websites of full flash pages. You want to give search engines what they want, and right now its html, css, text links, alt image tags and of course your title and description.

4. Use flash to add interest and interactivity. Make a flash tutorial or demo with the text in html under the flash movie.

Well thats pretty much it. If your going for the flashy designs and love flash, go for it! Just remember to include text and content links combined with your flash so your site gets properly indexed.

About the Author:
John Melwak Small Business Web Design Service