Flash has long been used as a creative and eye-catching feature to greet visitors to your site. It was a great addition to any site in the past, but in today’s technological environment, it is simply too much with little in the way of return as people have seen all that can be done and it is simply an annoyance for those who stumble upon it.
This article will point out why you should avoid flash at all costs for anything outside of a personal website designed for friends and family exclusively. Continue reading if you have considered using Macromedia Flash on your site and learn why you should avoid adding it.
One of the biggest drawbacks to Flash animations is the overall costs. If you are using your site to generate revenue, you need to know that it takes awhile to recover your initial costs for the site and hosting itself. The last thing you need to do is spend additional money for a tool that will not pay for itself over the coming months. If you are designing a personal site, while Flash is okay, again it is an expensive feature that in your case will cost money that you will never recoup.
One of the biggest problems with Flash, outside of the unnecessary expense, is that it causes serious delays in your site loading. Now in general, this would not be a big issue with people on PC’s and laptops using DSL or cable for their internet access but those using portable devices and phones are using a data plan and the problem is there.
The number of individuals using smaller devices outnumbers those searching the web on computers making Flash something that not only dogs down the site loading time, but also limits the number of visitors as not all have newer devices that can play Flash. Remember that while portable device manufacturers make new models on a consistent basis, they are slow in offering O/S updates leaving many out in the cold and unable to view your site.
As stated above, animations are purely just eye-candy today that does little in the way of attracting visitors as it is simply old technology that dogs down a persons system. While still in use, it has gone the way of GIF files where it is interesting but does little for the visitor as it has been done to death.
Think of a site that uses a flash screen that loads an intro video rather slowly before you can get to the navigational video. It looks great but your patience wears thin as you wait for what you came to the site to see.
Finally in the day of SEO to improve rank and generate traffic, Flash does nothing for your site as it is not searchable by web crawlers. This means you have not only wasted bandwidth but also space that could be designated for content that can be crawled and used to improve your site ranking in search engines.
If you are looking for a website that reaches all who are interested in what you have to offer, you should consider avoiding Flash based content. It is simply expensive with zero return and it can actually hinder your search engine ranking. It is far better to focus on high quality content to attract consumers opposed to animations that could drive visitors away with little hope for recovering the costs via future sales.
