"SEO: Flash is Evil. Five big reasons not to use Flash"

The article that I found for this week is titled “SEO: Flash is Evil. Five Big Reasons Not to Use Flash”. The article is basically a rant on why Flash is not a good program f choice to design web related materials. While some o the points made are rather true, the article is mostly ones own opinions on why they dislike the program. Seems to me that the person who wrote this article simply has a personal problem with the program. He starts off the article by simply saying, “Building Flash-powered websites is wrong. Storing your content in Flash Movies is wrong. Implementing site navigation in Flash is wrong.” While this person obviously dislikes flash, they do lend a few complements to the program in the first paragraph of the article.
After the complements that were few and far between, the author begins to elaborate on just why he dislikes Flash websites so much. The first problem is that Flash requires bandwidth. He states that despite DSL being available almost everywhere, there are still lots or people still using dial-up, or limited bandwidth. This holds particularly true being that I use dialup when at home. I know first hand how Flash animations and websites take forever to load hen I am using the dial-up. However, it is important to think in terms of the future considering the Internet is constantly improving. In a day when all people have a fast connection, Flash will most likely be extremely prevalent in web design. The reason there are so many more Flash websites being created, is because the trend shows that more and more people are using high speed Internet. It is simply not geared toward connection speeds of the past.
His next peeve is that some designers use meta refreshes or other tricks to disable the browser’s back button. This can be highly annoying and cause people to leave the site prematurely. This is the exact opposite of what a Flash animation is supposed to do. While I agree that this may be an annoying thing to happen, I do not think that it is a reason to bash the Flash program. This problem is caused by the designer, who I using the program, and not the program itself.
The next con is that Flash ignores users needs. The author basically is referring to the websites that have massive intros and splash screens that take forever to load, and apparently cannot be skipped. Also the sound effects that some animations may have can be highly annoying, and inappropriate at certain times. Once again, this is a designer’s flaw, and not a problem with Flash. Flash can be used in a highly effective manner without stupid sounds. With a little common sense and design knowledge, these small problems could be obsolete.
The last problem that the author speaks about is that search engines do not like Flash. In this section he talks about how search engines are unable to crawl and index the content of flash movies. This holds true especially for websites that are fully implemented in Flash. He goes on to say that Flash is decent for banners and ads, as well as games. His last point is probably the one that makes the most sense. Since you would probably want someone to find your website in a search engine, this could be a problem. However, with most of what was said in the article, it is simply a designer’s flaw. To me this article does not give any concrete evidence that would make me choose to not use Flash for web design.


Link:
http://www.seoresearcher.com/seo-flash-is-evil-five-big-reasons-not-to-use-flash.htm