By Rob Sullivan
Flash movies can be a great thing. They can help catch eyes thatare otherwise bored with static looking pages, and they can helptell a story better than plain text. However the use of flashmust be tempered with the ability to rank in search engines.This article describes some of the considerations andrecommendations when using flash on a website.
Disney does it. And so does Oprah. Even my favorite pizza placedoes it. That is embed their primary navigation and importantcontent inside a flash movie. In fact in all these cases, a goodpart of the sites home page is flash, rendering that section ofthe page invisible to search engine crawlers.
Granted these are extreme cases of sites which use flashextensively, but there are other cases where even a little flashcan be improperly used. There are also cases where flash is notonly appropriate, it is recommended. The question then becomeshow to best use flash without affecting search engine rankings.
Much like the early settlers of the Wild Wild West we are thefrontiersman (and women) of a new community - the World Wide Webcommunity (notice the WWW analogy) - which has seen its birth inthe past couple decades and has really experienced its growthhappen in the last 10 years or so.
And throughout that time there have been many ways to display awebsite and its content. Some were more successful than others.But there is one aspect of web development which has been hotlycontested between designers of websites and those who positionthem. That is the use of Flash.
Flash has been around for some time now and while it is pretty(for lack of a better word) it can seriously hinder a websitesability to position well in the search engines. This is becausemost search crawlers can not see nor effectively index flash orits contents. Therefore anything contained within the flash,including page content or more importantly site navigation, isinvisible to them.
Yet flash does have it's good points as well. As I mentionedabove, it can turn an otherwise bland looking site intosomething unique and refreshing. So the question becomes - wheredoes one balance the need for search engine indexability withthe need for impressing customers?
Well here's a rule of thumb for you - less is better.
Less flash occupying the page is better, as well as having aslittle content embedded within it as possible. Further, wherethe flash appears on the page can have an impact on its abilityto deliver the intended message.
Let's have a quick survey - how many of you, upon coming to asite, tune out the top 1/5 of the page, and even a couple incheson the right of the page - especially if you see flashing ormovement?
Just as I suspected, most of you. I do it too. And we do thisbecause these are the places we typically see banner ads,therefore we associate that space on many sites with advertisingand tune it out.
But there are cases when sites place important messages, viaflash, in these locations. But if many people tune out theselocations, they are also tuning out that important message.Hence the reason the flash doesn't do so well on the page.
So there's tip number one: Don't place your flash where it willbe ignored - namely those spots on the page normally associatedwith advertising.
My second flash tip - don' t take up most of the screen with it.Keep the screen real estate it occupies to less than ½ thescreen, preferably on the left side. There are many reasons forthis:
Too often, as people are orienting themselves to the page, theireyes scan the page and are all over it for a few seconds, andthen fixate on the top left of the page. If you have a flashmovie running (and especially if its one without controls) theyhave missed a few seconds of that message. And we all know whatgood a message is that's incomplete?
Another reason for minimizing flash usage: While more and morepeople are adopting broadband every day, still close to half ofthe US uses dial up. Which means everything takes longer toload. And if these users are waiting for a flash movie to load,they could navigate away from your site in frustration becausethe page is taking so long to load.
Some other recommendations:
Don't use the flash to tell the story, use it to enhance thestory. If you are trying to sell a product, leave the importantinformation in the HTML of the page, but use the flash toemphasize the product by either displaying it, or pointing outthe benefits. your flash should be complementary and not toooverwhelming.
Finally, did you know you can also externalize the code requiredto display the flash? This is something that can help improvepage load times which could improve spiderability.
Using a technique similar to one I described in theexternalizing JavaScript article, you can externalize the codeused to render the flash. You can use the same code used tocreate a drop down box via JavaScript to externalize the flashcode (using the document.write code and embedding the HTMLneeded to display the flash there).
As you can see, based on this article, is that flash isn't allthat bad, provided its used properly. That means it shouldn't betoo overpowering or occupy too much of the page. It should becomplementary to the message the page is intending to give, andshould be located in places that people will look at, and not inplaces normally associated with advertising.
If you follow these simple rules, your flash can become anessential selling point to your site. One which could provideyour customers the little push they need to move from browsersto buyers
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