We marketers applying Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in our marketing like to say ” Flash is not cash”. If you are using Internet t market your services or products, fancy flash is one the last things to invest!
Let me explain.
Fisrtly, time is a big factor on the web. Flash presentations take time to load. This is not a criticism of the Flash program itself. However, when this is the first thing your visitor is hit with – “wait while your movie loads” … he can quickly lose patience.
Secondly, online marketing studies prove that you’ll lose some 20% of prospect every tie you require to click to get to the second page. Even if you’d have the friendly “skip the flash intro” link on your gatekeeper flash page, too many will click away from your site instead of going deeper – just because you already proved with your website design that what you offer requires extra work and takes more of their time.
Thirdly, flash presentations don’t make any sense to search engines. There is no way to know what the content is. Therefore it’s not indexed, or is it not suggested in search results. How could it be because search engines have no idea of the value and relevance of the flash content! Having flash presentation on your front yard of your valuable online property is almost like having a blank advertisement in a newspaper. You can definitely do much better using text and images. Nowadays Google is getting much better in understanding what video content, so you have that option too!
Using a multimedia approach using all these three ways to deliver information – text (well written so that it contains the important keyword phrases), images (with descriptive file names and “alt” text) and video (yet, it need to be directly related to your message, and done in an interesting way) – is a winning combination.
Except that the purpose of your website is to parade the latest web technologies, avoid “show-offs” that delivers little else to your visitors. Ask yourself the question: “Why does my website need an introduction page with Flash?” If you cannot come up with a good answer, than that it looks cool to you, leave it off.
