I'm going to be completely honest. It is rare-- very rare, that I see
Flash used in a way that I feel adds meaningful value to a website.
It is also, from a upkeep and rapidly changing/evolving site point of
view, an absolute nightmare. I'll confess that this is more of the
past pseudo-coder speaking (I don't really build sites anymore but I
have), but I have almost always found Flash to be a lot more trouble
than it's worth.

This is not to say that it CAN'T be useful, just that you have an
uphill battle when trying to convince me of its utility in most cases.
Often, Flash is used on sites that have no clear goal.

For instance, think of any possible reason you would visit a website.
Now visit doritos.com. How long did it take you to figure out what
you wanted to do? Perhaps you're a lot brighter than I am, but it
took me a heck of a long time.

Don't get me wrong-- the site is absolutely awesome technically and
clearly cost a lot of time, money and resources, and clearly involved
some very talented people, but it's made by designers and/or people
who did not put the thought into what the site would be used for. As
an aside, I showed the site to a senior graphics designer guy/friend
of mine, and he started saying how cool and great the site was ;)

Recently a company that has been advertised heavily in my area
oilchange.com (relating to websites), pushes a lot of flash use which,
while they appear to have done very very well for themselves, is
entirely different from how I would ever build a website personally.

To be glib, flash is flashy, it wins a lot of people over, especially
, at least in my mind, those who don't have a very deep understanding
of how the web operates and what a website is supposed to be/do. When
you really start digging down into what it is your flash provides to
the user however, I think you'll find that the vast, vast majority
could and more importantly should do without.







--- In webanalytics@yahoogroups.com, "michaelnotte" <michaelnotte@...>
wrote:
>
> Thanks for your feedback.
>
> What we do is that all important / main content from Flash is
> automatically added in the HTML page but not visible if Flash player
> is available (NO FLASH Script part). So Search engines still see the
> content and refer to the page using <TITLE>, <DESCRIPTION> tags.
>
> So we didn't wait for SE to index flash content...
>
> Concerning the usage of Flash, we avoid building FULL flash sites
> like http://www.honda.co.uk/car/ and agree that you can do a lot of
> things with HTML / CSS but we use a lot of Flash content integrated
> in our sites. So Flash is more considered as an asset of our sites
> (like images, videos, text, pdf's,...).
>
> Cheers
>
> Micha�l
>
> --- In webanalytics@yahoogroups.com, Birger Friedrichs <bf@> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Micha�l,
> >
> > michaelnotte wrote:
> > > In our case, for example a Flash microsite is often translated in
> > > several languages. It is ONE Flash site but fed with text coming
> from
> > > XML files containing local translations. So won't get indexed.
> > >
> > > Or am I wrong?
> >
> > yes, using XML to generate multilingual flash presentations is a
> common
> > way.
> > As stated by Google the content will be indexed *but* separately
> and not
> > as part of the flash file.
> >
> > Indexing is one question, the other one is: How well will the flash
> > stuff rank on the SERPs? I don't think that it will beat the plain
> HTML
> > pages with all the different HTML tags (b, strong, hx, anchor
> text...).
> > Another problem with flash or not with flash itself but how it is
> often
> > implemented:
> >
> > The site contains only *one* page with one flash object embedded.
> So
> > while showing a lot of information on that page through the flash
> Google
> > will only see one page. It might be better to break down the
> content
> > into different topics and create several HTML pages with proper
> HTML
> > titles for each topic. Then Google can index the different pages
> with
> > the flash content separately. But I doubt that it will rank better
> than
> > plain HTML pages. Of course it also depends on the inbound links.
> If you
> > fire Thousands of relevant links to a flash page it can have a
> better
> > ranking than a HTML version with less inbound links.
> >
> > I would currently not "hide" important content in flash. My 2 cents.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Birger
> >
>