Jun

SEO Friendly Flash Sites for Every Platform

June 22, 2009 | Tagged in Flash, JQuery, SEO |

A few days ago I wrote an article based on my professional experience that Flash isn’t necessary to make a media-rich site. I spent the first 5 years of my career learning and honing my ActionScript 2.0 skills. Just as ActionScript 3.0 was debuting, so were all the beautiful sites powered by JavaScript. Dare I say, the Web 2.0 trend. So I shifted my learning focus.

Paul Falgout, a lead developer at Otterball, read my article and had a great response, albeit in disagreement. Otterball is a Nashville-based agency whom I freelance for on occassion. They’ve got an incredible Flash CMS that allows them to turn out all the tasty, media-rich features you’d expect from Flash…but the content remains entirely SEO-friendly. Here’s what Paul had to say.

I’d have to disagree with the Flash article. I don’t know what everyone has against Flash. The two competitors we have that are larger than us in Nashville that build both Flash or html sites start their prices significantly higher than we do regardless of whether it is Flash or not.. so in comparison to our competition we build a full Flash site for cheaper. And typically the development time is shorter as we don’t have to deal with browser incompatibilities. And since the cm2 (Otterball‘s proprietary Flash CMS) controls the content displayed as you mentioned, Google gets content, but the iPhone also gets a site built specifically for it. This is typically a far better option than having an html page with pieces of Flash in it as you recommend. This is because the content we send to the iPhone is content for the iPhone. Most html sites assume iPhone users will be able to use their site, but every Flash embed will fail.

Consider dryve.us as an example: Full Flash website. Read by search engines, built for the iPhone, drop dead simple to update for the client, doesn’t require Flash 10 or even 9, but if the user doesn’t have Flash (or javascript), they’ll simply see the iPhone site, including the client login portion. And there isn’t a preloader.

The problem we deal with is that, developers and designers in particular, seem to believe that Flash has too many problems to deal with, but we believe if handled correctly, using some simple techniques, Flash is a powerful tool for quick development without compatibility issues. Plus considering you can embed fonts and use dynamic layer styles such as multiply and overlay, it gives the designer significantly more freedom. Plus in Flash you can create a preloader if you want to so that you can control the way the site reveals to the user. In html there are techniques, but the page loads content as it comes in, and each time you go to a new page it’s time to refresh the whole thing. This makes audio players on an html site nearly useless.

I think I need to write a blog that says “A functional site does not need to be built in html” as I fully believe that all of these misconceptions about Flash are because so many people use Flash poorly or incorrectly. This has lead people to believe that it cannot be done correctly.

Paul mentions building a separate Flash site specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I wonder how much cost that adds to the site, since the same designs don’t necessarily translate to HTML. What budget is set aside specifically for each project’s mobile site? Does the same CMS driving the Flash site also updates the mobile site? A great example of one company delivering separate content for your mobile device is Dakine. Still, having been to the non-mobile, tricked-out Flash version…I’m left somewhat disappointed. Will mobile sites ever be exciting as their Flash-based counterparts until Flash becomes available for the iPhone?

Finally, Paul told me he wrote a tutorial for anyone wanting to build their site with Flash and SEO in mind. Unfortunately, I can’t share that article with you until later this summer when its released. So stay tuned. I’ll get permission to link to the online tutorial as soon as its ready.

Abbreviated Bio

My name is Amy Stoddard and I'm a balanced left/right brain that can design a comp and code well-written HTML & CSS, JavaScript, PHP and mySQL. Actionscript 2.0 is my old flame. Read More About Me