Limiting Flash Use In Web Design
April 6th, 2010
It is clear that Flash has established itself as a web standard. The Macromedia Flash plug-in is installed in over 90% of web users’ browsers. This means virtually all users accessing the web can display animated flash content. But recently the question arose as to why a company’s web site doesn’t rank well, even for the company’s name. The most widespread problem encountered with websites is the use of Macromedia / Adobe Flash to develop most or all of a company’s website.
Alas, Flash technology is a poor choice for most commercial web sites. It breaks most web standards and conventions. While Flash sites are generally beautiful to look at, they fail to meet a number of minimum criteria for business-oriented websites.
There are some problems introduced by Flash and web designers should be aware of them.
1. Information inserted in Flash is often invisible to search engines. Most Internet navigators begin a web session with a search engine. Even when they know a domain name, they start with Google or a similar search engine. Search engines are tuned to process text, semantically wrapped in tags. Information concealed in graphics formats, such as Flash, is difficult, if not impossible for search engines, to find and process.
2. Website reporting on Flash navigation is problematic and burdensome. Flash based websites present real problems for the types of Web Analytics reporting tools. Flash designers are often unfamiliar with Web Analytics requirements and thus don’t consider Flash events tagging requirements during site design. Implemented tag verification is a boring process, as it requires waiting for data to appear in the reporting system – hours or days later. Flash doesn’t provide referrer information, making it very difficult to track navigation paths.
3. Flash breaks web usability standards. The back and forward buttons do not work in 100% Flash designs. You cannot highlight contact information, bookmarking a page within the site or increase the font size. Preventing the use of these functions highly reduces usability of the site.
4. Perceptive web users have learned to disable Flash in web pages to avoid animated advertising or to improve page-loading times on dial-up connections.
5. Unfortunately, standard Flash object embedding in the current html version, xhtml, doesn’t validate correctly.
Tags: flash use in web design, problems in web design, Web Design, web graphics, web site design, website design
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 7:19 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
18 Responses to “Limiting Flash Use In Web Design”
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