Many website developers have been using Macromedia / Adobe Flash when designing websites for clients. Flash gives them the ability to create some visually stunning designs. Although these sites may look appealing, and thus are probably easy to sell to business owners, there are some serious drawbacks to using Flash when designing websites.

Today, many internet users begin their session with Google or some other search engine. Many even do this if they know the URL of the site they want to visit. Search engines are the gateway to the internet. With so many different domain extensions today (.com, .net, .org, etc.) it is easier to trust Google to find what they are looking for. Because of this, it is absolutely a must that businesses make their websites easily visible to search engines.

Search engines work by scanning information on the internet, indexing it, and then returning the best match when a user enters a query. Search engines are programmed to read text. They can understand the context of hypertext markup language, or HTML for short. When a search engine comes across information embedded in graphic formats such as Flash, it has a difficult time extracting any details of what is contained within.

Websites constructed completely using Flash will often not rank well in the search engines. Even websites built with only a little bit of Flash will have a difficult time dominating the search engines.

Creating a website using Flash also creates great problems with tracking and reporting. A great tool for website marketers is using some kind of website analytics program to track detailed information about visitors to the website. What these tracking tools allow one to do is track where a visitor came from, what pages they viewed on the website, and from what point did they leave the website. Obviously, this allows for fine tuning and improving the site in question.

Without getting into all the nitty gritty details of how these programs perform their tasks, let me just say that Flash throws a big wrench into the whole process. The analytics program can track that the user did enter into the Flash object, but will be unable to give any data about what the user interacted within inside there, what they viewed or didn’t view, and where they exited. Now, if an entire site is programmed in Flash and not just a few little interactive additions to the site, you might as well forget extracting any information about what your visitors are doing when they come to your site.

Websites programmed entirely in graphic formats do not allow for any bookmarking or linking to specific pages of a website. This is often referred to as deeplinking by SEO marketers and is a vital part of search engine optimization.

Flash websites also take far longer to load. Ever visit a site and then have to wait ten seconds while some intro loads and plays for you? Flash is the culprit in this case. Not only is it not user-friendly, but recently Google announced that they will be incorporating website load times into their search engine rankings. If your site takes too long to load, you might find all your competitors ranked ahead of you in the search engines.

Flash does give website designers the tools to make some fantastic looking interactive sites. Those same designers usually don’t understand the harm they are doing to a business by using Flash. In only some cases does using it make sense for a website, such as creating a multimedia site to support an already established brand name. Otherwise, you may end up with a beautiful website that nobody will ever see.