Why You Should Never Create a Flash Website!

One of the biggest errors people fall into, not knowing any better, is to be suckered by flashy web developers who sell them a visually appealing 100% Flash based website. Below are a few of the more compelling reasons as to why you should never make the mistake of creating, or hiring a developer that will create, a 100% Flash driven website.

Flash Cannot be Indexed Properly by Most Search Engines!

The very first thing you must realize is that, especially for businesses, a website is a marketing medium, and one that is growing at an exponential rate. As such, the primary goal for a website is to attract as many visitors (ie: prospects) to your site. To this end, the most critical aspect of your website, before content and visual appeal, is whether or not it is indexed on search engines, such as : Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Sadly, Flash is not indexable by search engines and therfore your site will not appear in any search engines (at least not from natural organic search engine optimization techniques).

Now, some people will argue that Flash sites can be indexed. While this can be accomplished, the sad matter of fact is that most (95%+) flash designers do not take the necessary steps to do this for their clients and as such the general statement above hold a great amount of truth!

Flash Websites Significantly Increase Load Time

Because a site is 100% Flash driven, it requires loading the entire Flash file before displaying any content to the user. Thus, there is a significant increase in the initial load time and bandwidth usage (both for user and on the hosting server - which can impact hosting costs). What is also important is to know how long this load time can be for dial-up users. Common consensus states that you have between 5 and 8 seconds to hook your viewer before they move on. If your site takes longer than that to load, you are most probably turning away your prospects!

A Concrete Illustration
This very WebPage requires a total 39.5Kb of bandwidth to load. Therefore, for a dialup user it will take ±1second to load.

On the other hand, a new client of mine had a Flash website developed, by their previous designer, which includes a total of 10 pages. So when you view their site you are in fact loading 10 pages for a total of over 500Kb. Therefore this would translate into a 10½ seconds or more load time. Would you wait 10 or more second for a site to load? Or would you simply goto the next link on Google, Yahoo or MSN? Ask yourself the question! Statistically, it is a proven fact that web users simply move on.

Flash Websites Cannot Generate Proper Site Statistics

Because a 100% Flash driven website is a single file, proper site statistics cannot be gathered. Without valid statistics you will have no way to indentify your website's weaknesses so that you can improve them. This may not sound very important, and yet it is the most crucial component of any successful website! Continuous improvement is the name of the game in web design.

Let's Recap

So to briefly recap, below are the most compelling reasons why one must never create a 100% based Flash website:

• It cannot be indexed by most search engines
• A website is a marketing tool so why would you build one that cannot be found when people look for it?!
• It requires loading the entire site rather than just a single page (much longer load time, higher bandwidth for both the server and the user, is most probably turning away dial-up users)
• It cannot generate accurate site statistics as the various web pages, images and other media are not individual files

This is not to say Flash does not have its place in a web designer’s toolbox!  Flash can be a very useful medium, but it should be woven into a website like any other medium (images, pdfs, documents, movies, etc.) in select areas rather than building an entire website around it!