Published: 20th Dec 2017 | Words: 417 | Reading Time: 3 minutes

Development

Why not to use Flash on your website

This isn’t an explanation of how flash works within your web page but rather a warning to avoid flash within your website. If you do need special effects within your page, look at manipulating different elements using JavaScript and HTML5. The scope of what can be achieved with both of these is immense, almost anything you can think of. While flash is probably a much easier process of building interactive features, building the same in HTML and JavaScript will probably seriously expand your knowledge of both of these languages and give you an insight into more modern technologies.

Dont build your entire site in flash

While it is impressive what you can achieve using flash, fancy text, games etc., building flash elements within a web page is not a great idea if you have content within your flash videos that you wish search engines to read and index. Just like a video some search engines cannot read the content within a flash video. It sees it as just a file and if you are considering building your entire website using flash it’s probably a seriously bad idea unless you build workarounds for your content. Flash videos can create issues for your navigation and how search engines crawl your site if you use Flash for your navigation or a large amount of links. If you’re basing a lot of your SEO strategy on getting ranked for a high amount of quality content you should look at replacing flash videos with something like an animated image.

A great program but not for SEO

While a few years ago flash seemed like the next big thing, in recent year’s advances in other languages has rendered a flash almost obsolete. Because of the ease of producing flash videos it will probably still be used for years to come although to get the most out of it you need to learn ActionScript. The interface is just like any adobe program, incredibly well laid out and easy to use. While it’s an easy program to use, and the results can be great, flash content is useless for SEO across different search engines. The message really is to avoid Flash elements within your web page and don’t include them just for the sake of it. Avoid them unless you absolutely need them.