Infinite Path

If you’re designing and running your own website, you will probably have heard people advising you to avoid flash at all costs. This is all well and good but do you really know the reasons why it should be avoided? The truth is that there are far more than six good reasons to avoid using it but the main ones are as follows:

1. If you have a Flash intro on your site, every single visitor will be annoyed. This may be a generalisation but, on the whole, nobody is interested in Flash intros, particularly if they have to view them each and every time they visit your site. With SEO, you want to encourage revisits as much as new visits and Flash intros are likely to contribute to a decreasing revisit rate.

2. Flash files come with timing issues. They take ages (in relative web terms) to load and in this day and age of speed and impatience when it comes to websites, people may click away instead of waiting. People want to find good information on the web but, more importantly, they don’t want to waste time looking for it.

3. Human beings are not the only ones who get annoyed by Flash. Websites that only use Flash are giving the search engines a really hard time. The search engines find it difficult indexing and searching through these websites and this makes the whole process of SEO extremely difficult.

4. Websites which just use Flash may not have unique URLs for each page. This causes problems with regards to indexing individual pages in the search engines, bookmarking, and inbound linking. A good website should have an abundance of internal linking but this will not be possible for Flash websites. Furthermore, if you’re trying to get back-links from other websites, you will only be getting links to your homepage since there are no deeper links to be found. This is tantamount to SEO suicide.

5. These websites have basic issues with usability. Simple actions performed by visitors commonly are impossible on certain sites using Flash. These actions include highlighting text in order to copy and paste it somewhere else or trying to alter the font of the text.

6. Access is a major problem with Flash. Whilst Flash will be installed on most browsers, you cannot guarantee that your visitor will have the latest version installed. Very few people will bother updating their version just to access the content on your website.