Friday, October 9, 2009

The Use Of Adobe Flash

By Bonita Li

The question is often raised during meetings with managers and business top dogs: Is it alright to have a flash animated web site? How do we use Adobe Flash properly to build a web site?

In case you are not acquainted with Flash, it is an animation software which is graphic-based and can make websites look fruitful and interactive. Flash is particularly good at developing different types of interactive content, such as product demonstrations and training modules. However, search engines such as Google cannot "index" the site if the whole site is built by Flash.

There is a simple way to prove whether a web page can be "indexed" or not. On a web page, try to highlight the text, which means the content, by clicking the left button of your mouse and dragging it over the text. If you are able to highlight the text in blue, that means the text of the page are in different "layers", hence it can be "indexed". It is because a web page can only be "indexed" when the text or any graphic on that page are in different "layers", which is essential for search engines to "index" a page as those engines can "index" text-based content easily.

When Flash is used to build a web site, the text will be put into different layers as photos or graphics. This make it difficult for Google to index the page. Google needs to be able to read the web site and look for information so that they can put the web page under a certain keyword searching database system. Indexing is therefore extremely vital.

In the old days, it is completely impossible for Google to index content written using Flash. Although there are news saying that Google and Adobe are working towards the goal of making content written using Flash more indexable, there are no test results on whether the attempt is successful or not. Therefore, it is of your best interest to incorporate text-based content in your website and avoid using Flash to create your entire web page.

People like using Flash to create their websites as Flash does not only make a website look more attractive, the interaction that Flash can add to a website also appears functional for users. However, what Google is looking for is text-based content. Thus, there exists a trade-off.

There are business owners who decide to go both ways, just in case. These web pages let users choose between 'HTML Site' or 'Flash Web Site' from the Home Page. Naturally, that is one of the ways to compromise with Google's system, but the workload of managing two web sites at the same time can be unbearable for some of the business owners and their teams.

A better solution to the problem is to embed flash content within a HTML website. This way, you can still utilize the outstanding functions of Flash to create an attractive and functional website while allowing Google to index the other text-based content on your website. With this strategy, you can achieve your goal of search engine optimization with little compromise on the design and functionality of your website.

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