Flash Animation - good or bad?
20/07/2009
One of the first requests I often get when meeting with clients is for flash animation in their websites. The answer? Sure, no problem. Done properly, Flash can have a great visual impact on your audience. However, if your priority is achieving a good page rank in search engines (as is the case with most businesses), it is probably best to leave it for now.
Why? While Flash websites may be eye catching to the user, they create problems for search engine crawlers when trying to index your web page for results in directories such as Google.
The degree of difficulty a crawler has when it comes up against a Flash file (.swf extension) varies between search engines. Some will not index it at all. Some will index parts of the file though, what they take home to their parent search engine is usually just code, not indexable text.
Well known brand names like Nike and Coke can get away with creating amazing flash websites. People already know these brands and search for them by name, they don't need to be found on the web. Unless your brand has already ahcieved this level of recognition, people are going to find your website in search engines by searching for the products and services you have to offer, not by brand. Most businesses who desire a healthy online presence can ill afford to be as flippant with the search engines.
At the end of the day, search engine crawlers love text. Plain old easy to read, indexable text. After all, it is the textual content of your website, when matched up with the search terms people use, that gets you appearing in their results. Anything that could possibly hinder a crawler from indexing your pages completely and easily just isn't worth the risk early on, if ever.
This is of course, not to say a regular HTML site with some flash embedded in it will not appear in search results at all, just that it may not do as well as it would without it.
Load speeds can also be a problem. Not everybody has a super fast connection speed just yet and potential customers/clients may not be willing to wait around while your fantastic piece of flash animation loads for them.
So, the idea is to get your site ranking well and generating some business first. Once these goals have been achieved, maybe embedding a little bit of flash can be in the next upgrade.
