I went to our trusty search engine Google this morning to find a phone number for a local jeweler here in town. After all, I had to make sure Santa was going to be here this year on time with a gift for the girlfriend or else I’d be in trouble. The results came up and I noticed a few things.
First, this large (for our area) jeweler’s main website isn’t ranking first when I use the query “saxons bend”. Given it looks like they own both domains, the main domain they use isn’t ranking well at all. In fact, it’s only there because they have a Google Places listing and Google knows that the business that I’m searching for is close to my IP address.
And second, they have no description. Oh wait, they do. It’s “initializing… initializing…”
That’s exactly what I wanted to know about this business without actually clicking on their site right?
Take a look at what I’m talking about below.
Are we REALLY still in the using full flash sites in 2011 (almost 2012) where a business’s web presence is more important than ever?
There are a handful of reasons why this is a terrible route to take, but I will just go into a couple.
- Flash can’t be indexed by the search engines. Their bots can’t go in, download your gigantic flash file, sift out the content it needs, then turn around and rank it. It’s not possible. Even if it were, would you really want to make the search engines go through all the effort?
- Flash is clunky. People are trained to use websites a certain way. When you start changing the way the page scrolls and behaves, people become irritated and unsure so they’ll move on to the next page.
- Flash has high load times. I have an average cable connection. 8mb downstream. From when I clicked on the Google link to 100% page load, it took over 30 seconds. This is way too long. Like about 25 seconds too long. Make your web pages easy to navigate and load fast. Google actually uses page load time as a ranking factor so it’s more important than ever to get little things like this right. Not just for Google, but for your potential customers/clients.
Now you may think this post is an anti-flash rant, which I can understand how it may come off that way. 
The truth of the matter is, flash can be a good thing. It’s got it’s uses. Use flash sparingly. Maybe use it for an image slide show. Maybe use it for a calculator. But use it for PARTS of your site, not the whole thing. You’ll be much more successful with your online business if you stick to clean HTML 4/5, CSS, and Javascript.