January 27th, 2008 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

It seems that the post I did about SiteCube has caused a bit of a fuss. In fact I’ve removed the one way link to the reseller that was originally mentioned (because I was asked to) , I’m not trying to wreck anybody’s business, just make a point. Whenever I talk about Flash I’m talking from a business perspective, more specifically a small business point of view, if you want to have a Flash website built to host your family photographs then each to their own. Personally I’d go for a free service like Flickr or even better PhoTrade (and make some money out of it) but that’s just me.

Anyway, Flash and the small business. Here are my top 5 reasons why I don’t like Flash websites:-

1. Eliminating Dial-Up Traffic – I know this will shock a lot of people but there are still a great number of people who access the internet via a dial-up connection. A quick look at my stats shows around 40% of people who come here do it via a dial-up internet connection. The load time involved with even a modest Flash website will be enough for most people to hit the back button.

2. Portability, Or Rather The Lack Off – In a modern world where the world wide web is about far more than using a computer it’s important that your website is usable on as many devices as possible. There are portable devices that support Flash but because of the lack of external formatting options/settings in my experience it is pointless. With a nicely valid xHTML/CSS site you’ve got no problems.

3. A Whole Website On 1 Page – In the eyes of the search engines your website is going to be limited to your title, description, keywords and as much text as you can get into your noscript tag. This not only has a terrible affect on any potential rankings but it also means that if somebody wants to link to a specific part of your flash website they can’t. This actively discourages other webmasters from linking to you. It’s also commonly accepted that larger websites are seen with a better light by the search engines.

4. Link Relevancy – It’s not the number of links that count anymore, it’s the relevancy. How can the search engines know if something is relevant or not if it can’t read what is on the page (beyond the title, description etc). Even if you can get links (which you’ll most likely have to buy) the chances of the search engines counting them as quality links is minimal.

5. PPC Quality Penalty – Have you ever tried attracting visitors to a Flash website with PPC, I have? It all comes back to that same old problem of what the search engines can and can’t trawl but you’re going to find it very hard to get a decent quality score when your landing page is a Flash website. This mean higher PPC costs per visitor, you’d also better hope that they’re not visiting via dial-up.

I own a small business and the thing that has made me relatively successful is the idea of a ROI. Everything I do with regards to my business has to have a ROI, having a website built is no different. With Flash I see the chance of getting anything back out the investment (no matter how small that investment may be) is extremely limited.

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Paul B