Its Time To Ditch Flash

Every now and then I stumble across yet another website created entirely in Adobe Flash. When building websites or web applications your number one priority should be usability. If a user cannot use you site they will never find the information they are looking for. And if they cannot find what they want from you they will go to your competitor. Flash substantially hurts your site's usability and will likewise hurt your company. Don't get me wrong, Flash has some great uses (although some new technologies are making it obsolete), Flash is great for games and even some applications. But you should not build your entire website in Flash. There are too many problems when a website is completely built in Flash.

When you create a website you want it to be accessible to as many people as possible. When you build a website in HTML or even ASP or PHP (since they are entirely HTML as far as the user's computer is concerned) anyone with a web browser can access your website. If you use JavaScript you may loose a few people who are still running Windows 98, but almost everyone has a JavaScript enabled browser. Flash requires that you have it installed. Many people do have Flash installed, but many may not. Some users may not want (or may not be allowed) to install flash. These people will go find an alternative source of information which translates into you loosing customers.

Many people do have Flash installed, but Flash has many more usability flaws. Flash can be slow to load. When I go to a website I don't want to wait 10 or 20 seconds for it to load, I want it to load as close to instantaneous as possible. This will cause some users to give up and go elsewhere. It also wastes the user's and your bandwidth. Why put extra stain on your system if it is giving you no benefit. There is no reason to load every part of your site when the user only wants to see one page. This leads me to the next issue.

There is no easy way for a user to bookmark or follow a link to a certain page. Many times users find something they want to send to a friend to check out or just book mark it for later. With a Flash website the user always has to start from your homepage and cannot jump right to the information they are looking for. They may not remember how they navigated to the information the first time so they may never find it again. There are ways around this but many Flash sites don't implement them.

One thing I tend to do a lot is right click on a link and open it in a new tab. With Flash I can't do that. I have no choice but to follow the link. Now I am on a new page but I may not have an easy way to return to where I started because Flash breaks the back button (unless you implement certain work arounds).

Flash is not search engine friendly. To my knowledge there is no way for a search engine to crawl a Flash site. So you are relying on your keywords and description to get you a decent search ranking. A decade ago this may have been sufficient to get good rankings, but today keywords and a description are practically ignored. Search engines are going to heavily use your page content (among other things) to rank your site and if your page content only consists of Flash you are providing nothing to be ranked.

With JavaScript, Ajax, SVG, SMIL, and other newer technologies you will greatly improve your usability, search-ability, and overall value of your website. So take a little time to learn some newer technologies and ditch Flash, your customers with thank you!