Flash as a development environment is now a mature product.  However, as of yet it has still not taken the expected firm foothold in web site design that was expected a few years ago.  What happened?

Blame Google.

Flash sites are some of the most elegant and enjoyable web sites on the web.  Their fatal flaw is that search engines like Google are unable to index the content held within a flash file.  If the search engines can’t index your content, it may as well not exist as far as the average web user is concerned.

This may not be a problem for organizations with mature, vibrant brands.  Take Coca Cola for example.  Coke is a company with a strong, recognizable brand.  Their web visitors know how to get there, they are not stumbling on the coke website from a Google Search (unless they are googling ‘coke’).  Thus, Coke does not need to worry about search engines indexing all their content. They can use their web site as an extension of existing marketing efforts.  Traditional marketing (tv, print, etc) drives visitors to www.icoke.ca

If you visited that link you might notice that the entire site is developed in flash.  It makes for a nice web visit.

Now imagine that you are Martha’s Homemade Jewelry  Inc.  a small company making custom-designed jewelry.  You lack the billions of dollars spent on marketing that Coke can manage, you need your website to create traffic and interest in your product that you can’t generate through traditional marketing means.  A flash web site is not for you.

You need your website to be full of content that the search engines can index and categorize as being relevant to web searchers looking for jewelry online.  This means standard text available in your source code.

This does not mean that no flash content should be included on your site.  In fact, a flash header providing rotating images, slogan, factoids etc can be an excellent visual complement to solid text content on the same page.  Just use them sparingly for non-critical content.  And definitely, definitely stay away from 100% flash landing pages.  It is a waste of a page if the search engines can’t read it.

The most beautiful, cutting edge design is useless if nobody will ever find it.  Until Google finalizes a search engine that can read flash (and they are working on it) avoid it for all but the most supplementary purposes.