Online Traction

I received this cry for help yesterday from a web design firm:

So, we did this website in flash, and now the client is completely freaked out that he is not registering on search engines….now what? This is so f**ked up!, I hate not being educated on the pros and cons of why [to] do something!

Its a common complaint and harks from the late 90s and early ’00s when flash was fashionable with web design firms, clients and web users.

Its important to note that Flash does have appropriate uses particularly for sites that are essentially brochure-ware, where branding is as important as sales. Such sites include major brands such as Nike (the keywords ‘running shoe’ do not result in a 1st page listing in google) or web-design firms who use their sites to present their skills and abilities.

However, for the lions share of sites what matters is organic search engine ranking and visibility. In the early days of the mainstream web, way back 8 or so years ago the mantra of ‘build it and they will come’ seemed to be pervasive. This is no longer applies for two main reasons:

1. Sites programmed completely in Flash are largely invisible to search engines and prevent organic ranking in search engines. That said, sites programmed in Flash aren’t necessarily a disaster because a good link strategy and other ‘offsite factors’ can offset the damage caused to search engine ranking due to Flash. But that takes time, ingenuity and $.

2. Flash tries to entertain, which is appropriate for brochure-style sites, but all too often Flash is used inappropriately on sites where users are trying to accomplish something: locate a product, find information, make a purchase. In these cases Flash can be annoying and hinders the user.

Add to that the fact that web users are both fickle and sensitive particularly when they are in search mode. They typically visit many sites, make comparisons of products and often make decisions based on their experience of a site. So its not hard to imagine why a site that has an effective interface will be chosen over a site that imposes a short movie before taking you to where you want to go. Lesson: don’t take control from the user, make it easy for them to accomplish their objectives.

In fairness, Adobe, who own Flash, is trying rectify the situation but opinion varies as to its effectiveness in SEO terms.

The solutions or alternatives for sites using Flash obviously depends on the site’s commercial objectives and budget. In simple terms:

- a good solution is to build a hybrid site that blends animation with standard html content and tags. Some good examples here and here. Another liability in this situation is that the site visitor doesn’t have flash installed on their computer or has an incorrect version. Either way the user needs to go to Adobe and download software, the net effect of which may be interruption, inconvenience, and possibly a lost site visitor.

- alternatively, give the user the option of choosing the html version of the site or the Flash version in the first page of the site. This still isn’t optimal in terms of SEO because search engines put a premium on the content of the first page and are said to devalue sites with index pages with little content, and you still have the possibility that the user will be directed to Adobe.com to download software.

- or build a text-rich site with cascading style sheets (CSS - apologies to the non-techies). This is the preferred SEO solution and can also be done very effectively while creating a strong branding impression.

As always, you can’t manage what you can’t measure so base your design on what users actually do. Analyze and interpret your site data. A good way of determining the effectiveness and conversion capacity of your index page is to create two versions of it (1 version in Flash, the other a hybrid as described above). Then measure the front page bounce rate and other metrics described here to decide what works for your site visitors.