While it's important for a site to look polished and visually pleasing, aesthetic features should never be added at the expense of usability or your SEO campaign. There’s no use in making your pages attractive if their functionality is significantly impaired. From image resizing to simple but eye-catching calls to actions, I’ve helped many of my Los Angeles website design clientsfind a balance of professionalism and flair. Many inquire how the placement of their Flash files (vector graphics, animation, gradients, etc.) fits into this picture. Oftentimes, it doesn’t, and I can give you a few reasons why.

A website should be geared toward a speedy, convenient user experience, but Flash files create the opposite scenario by throwing up bothersome roadblocks to your visitors. Nitros and splash screens pop up and make most of us instantly search for a way to close them. Also, sound bytes you didn’t expect can make for a less than discreet browsing experience in a cubicle, library, or in the middle of the night next to your sleeping spouse.

Also, Flash eats up bandwidth, making it quite a chore to load a site if a visitor uses dial-up or other less than speedy ways to connect. Additionally, a meta-refresh function designers frequently implement with Flash disables your Back button, a hindrance that will make quite a few prospective clients bounce without delay. It will also prevent the copying or enlarging of text, as well as finding text with Ctrl + F, and make input fields and buttons appear different

In terms of you the business owner, all those embellished graphics and animations are quite complicated to add to a site and typically require the services of a third party designer. This sort of expertise does not come cheap in the first place, and quite a few designers code sites to disallow editing, so only they can get into the system to make adjustments. Hence, you might find yourself having to bring in (and pay) the same designer any time the smallest change to your graphics is needed.

Finally, in terms of SEO, Flash content doesn't always get properly indexed by search engines when they crawl your site. There can be errors that make exact linking a lot harder, so users won’t be accurately directed to you. A good SEO-geared alternative for your files is plain HTML.

There are still certainly instances when Flash is a very good fit, such as with online games, banners, and advertisements, but in the case of your business website you might want to reconsider.

Thanks for reading. Jason.
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