My exceptionally learned colleague Dan York recently pointed out that building your site in Flash, whilst good for interactivity, makes it very difficult to ‘word-of-mouth’ your site with a tasty image.
After all, capturing a logo or something to use as a visual cue is impossible if the site is all Flash. It was a blogged plea from Dan that started me adding images to my blog posts all those years ago…
Like Dan, I have been telling clients for years to stay away from Flash because of its poor search engine optimisation properties – plus its well nigh impossible to link to a specific ‘page’ in a Flash sequence [I say "well nigh impossible" because I've never heard of anyone able to do it, but if I just said "impossible" there would no doubt be some clever clogs who would come along and make me look like a Luddite].
It turns out that search engine optimisation is getting better at reading Flash files — good news!
And it turns out there may be other reasons why you might want to consider building your site in Flash…
- It’s much harder to comment spam a Flash form
- It’s much harder for naughty people to steal your images, music, logos etc and put them to a use you never intended
- It’s much easier to protect your IP (Intellectual Property).
Sure, all of the above can be done to a Flash .swf file, but you have to be a really clever clogs to do it — like Kazama obviously is.
Thanks for the conversation on your blog, Dan — it benefits us all.
