Is Flash a good for making websites

[Mr.bailey]

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Hey all i just want your opinion on some thing. I was wondering is flash a good program to make websites in. Is there any advantage to making a webite in faslh then say in frontpage or dreamweaver. I know you can make a webiste with all kinds of cool animations with faslh but will it make a differnece in who the webite is searched but search engine robots?

Thanks

[pricethat]

flash websites get as indexed as a slab of concrete. There was some mention of google being able to now index flash, but even a simple text file gets indexed far better than flash.

Graphics are pretty, but you should take into account pretty pictures never really sold anything other than pretty pictures of course

[Sammy aff]

as above:
unless you are ferrari or some other huge popular multi national corp forget flash.
or unless of course you are really good, you may get a job working for one of them

[pricethat]

But then if he was really good at using flash he would know not to use it for seo benefits

[morleymouse]

good for making websites - yes, they do look far prettier

good for affiliate marketting - not at the moment.

[Dynamoo]

It's such an important point that I'd thought I'd weigh in with a "me too". Check out Vince Flander's page What Would Amazon Do?. Basically, successful sales sites such as Amazon don't bother with fancy stuff like Flash - they try to keep it simple. (That whole site is a great way to learn about the fundamentals of design).

Doing a whole site is a no-no - it won't get indexed and not all browsers or PCs can handle Flash. You can use some design elements for Flash, but to be honest what's the point?

There are certain organisations that CAN use Flash successfully - usually for sites where the look of the think is extremely important - so "arty" sites for fashion houses or as Sammy says the likes of Ferrari.

My personal philosphy on site design can be summed up in three words - "Simple Sites Sell".

[Mr.bailey]

Thanks for all the input guys. very much appreciated. What about if I have some flash on the site you know like banners and stuff like that. Will the search engines punish my website for those flash aspects or will the search engines just ignore it?

[Another Media]

Safe to say it will be ignored.

As long as you have something that is spiderable such as text inside readable HTML then you will be fine.

[HairyCornflake]

have a look at fones4free. Was going to sign up until I realised either how difficult it was to navigate or how stupid I was?

Click on the 'trackbox' at the foot of the page for some porno music .

[Itchy]

have a look at fones4free. Was going to sign up until I realised either how difficult it was to navigate or how stupid I was?

Click on the 'trackbox' at the foot of the page for some porno music .

saw that site a while ago and thought OMG wheres the box with the x in it oh look there it is in the top right hand corner of my screen
text + images if you want to try and sell stuff not flash + oh look at my pretty loading page please wait and see what funky things ive done ...... Click

bugger hes gone

[andysears]

And those loading bars...waiting for them seems forever sometimes

[lowndsy]

Safe to say it will be ignored.

That's good sometimes - if you want to protect content from plagiarism or spidering then Flash might be an option for displaying it and protecting it with its unspiderability and graphical options for watermarks. You'd have to make sure you saved it as a protected swf file.