Why shouldn’t you use flash for your website? Can there be anything wrong with a website that “enhances” the user experience by flying/zooming/swirling/flipping in like a .PPS document?
Well, besides the lack of SEO, low usability (for example: back button not working, “find on this page” not working, the “make text bigger/smaller” button not working etcetera), nonstandard user interface, fully flash based sites are pretty much ok.
This is a really old issue and of course modern technology offers solutions like Flex for powerful web applications, but unfortunately the web is still filled with flash based sites… which use flash just for the design’s sake.
I’m not stating here that flash is bad or anything. It actually is GREAT! It’s the best choice right now for online streaming video or audio, the only choice for some web applications or games, a good way to make your banner ads stand out (even though this can be really annoying for the visitors but that’s a different topic).
Seeing how this is such an old topic, I need not to go in any more details as some people excellently did that already:
Making god use of flash: When you should and shouldn’t use it. Is Flash going to help me in communicating with my audience?
Really, people… these things are so last decade even my article looks old fashioned. There’s all the talk about web 2.0 and taking this paradigm to the next level… Do you think the definitions “the web as a platform” or “the web as a database” can include your site that not even Google can index due to the fact that the only navigation you have between pages is a flash menu?
I will give you “find on this page” not working, the “make text bigger/smaller” button not working but everything else is old fashioned. Non standard user interface? That’s the designer not the tool.
How about not working with screen readers… That’s as bad as accesability gets.
I actually wrote this article some time ago, but I have to restate my beliefs that a full flash site is a horible idea from a lot of points of view.
Even if there is some google indexing going on with flash, it’s got nothing on a well structured HTML.
Great info and right to the point. I am not sure if this is truly the best place to ask but do you guys have any thoughts on where to employ some professional writers? Thx 🙂