We’ve been telling our clients for a while now that full Flash websites just aren’t the way to go anymore. “But why, it looks so cool!?”, they all say…
There seem to be more and more reasons to steer clear of full Flash websites. Yes, Flash used to be the only way to go if you wanted to deliver a rich experience across a range of browsers, but that’s not the case anymore. With the advancements of modern browsers and JavaScript libraries, the same experience can be produced using Web standards, which is definitely preferable.
Flash isn’t supported by mobile devices, including iPhones and iPads, so your website will be lost to a large audience.
Search Engine Optimization for a full flash website is a challenge and often won’t be touched by search engine optimizers, because the likelihood of success is next to none. A full flash website doesn’t optomize well because it is usually an entire flash movie file which is embedded into one web page. As the flash movie is navigated from one page to the next, the website’s URL address never changes because it’s all on one page… that’s not good for SEO! The written content within the Flash file can’t be read by Search Engines, so the website won’t be indexted for search engines.
Flash definitely has it’s place on the web… but a full Flash website isn’t the way to go.