Flash Websites: Why they are a bad idea!

Looking for an all flash website? We do not build flash websites. If you want a flash website please check elsewhere.

Here are the reasons we don't use flash:

• Flash websites are annoying. An intro flash page is the number one cause of early departure for your guests. Having a flash intro page is a major cause of loss of business (regardless of how nice the flash presentation may be).
• Although flash is a very common program there are still a large percentage of viewers who do not have flash enabled. Meaning your website is completely invisible to these viewers. Instead of visitors installing flash to view your website, they just leave and don't come back.
• Flash is invisible to search engines. If you build an all flash website, you will not get any search engine traffic unless lots of links point to your website. Even then your competitors will dominate you for keywords. Putting your website traffic in a very peculiar position.
• Many PDA, and handheld devices still do not have flash enabled. Once again this is a lot of traffic that your website is not able to reach. And this number is growing rapidly.
• Look at any very popular website. There are very few that use all flash. There is a reason for this.
• If you want to update any part of your website you cannot do this yourself with Flash. You have to have pay the designer for any updates.

In many cases flash can be used to interact with a standardized website. Meaning there can be flash components like a banner. This is not a bad idea, but still does take away from your search engine optimization strength (You may suffer from slightly less traffic). For all the reasons above we do not use flash (except for picture galleries). There are other methods that look as good, but won't hurt your traffic.