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The Use and Misuse of Flash
Aesthetic Studios | White Paper

Overview

In July of 2003, William Pear International contracted Aesthetic Studios to develop a powerful website and corporate presentation for their business. William Pear believed at the time that the pro’s of using flash far outweighed the con’s, so we developed their site using flash.

View Before & After Screenshots

After a few months of the project going live, William Pear was disappointed with the results. Despite having a great website, they were getting no visitors and, more importantly, no inquiries for work through the website. After a discussion with Aesthetic Studios, in which we reviewed the problems the website was having and how they could possibly be solved, it was decided that the website must be redeveloped using standards-compliant code with a few, small flash elements. The resulting website would be a hybrid of flash and HTML.

The following is a collection of a few problems the flash website had and how they were addressed in the hybrid. Most of these problems are common to all flash sites, and others can be avoided. But all the problems weren’t caused by the use of flash; the success of a website depends more on its marketing than the technology used. With better marketing – both online and offline – the original website could have been quite successful even with its flaws. Its lack of publicity simply illuminated the fallacies and made them easier to identify.

Problem 1 - Search Engines

One of the biggest problems websites developed in flash have is trying to get in search engines. Search engines like Google use a website’s content to determine where it should be placed when a certain word is searched. But Google sees flash just like it sees images – a big box without any content. So if you have all your content inside a flash file, you are going to have some trouble.

William Pear’s website, like many other flash websites, kept all the text in the flash file. While this makes it easier to develop, it’s terrible for getting a good search engine position. William Pear is the 32nd listing when one searches for “william pear” in Google – a terrible position. Most people barely ever go beyond the first page (10 listings) when searching for something. With this position, visitors from search engines were almost nonexistent. And the worst thing is that the only text that the search engine sees is the small amount of text in the html file – the title of the webpage and a description of it. None of the content of the site is seen by the search engine, so if someone searched for something that the website discussed, it wouldn’t show up in the search results.

The Solution: In the hybrid version of the website, all the content isn’t in the flash but in the html code (code used to develop non-flash websites). This results in all the website’s content being seen by search engines – increasing the keywords under which your website appears when they are searched and raising the search engine position for those searched words. This will cause more people to find the William Pear website through the search engine.

Problem 2 - Flash Introduction

Once a visitor reaches the flash site, he is presented with the loading screen of the flash intro. It is a proven fact that you lose the majority of your visitors if your website doesn’t load in a few seconds. Even on fast connections the intro takes quite a while to load, so most of the people who visit the websites don’t even see the actual site – they leave when they see the preloader.

The Solution: Instead of having the website begin with the introduction, the hybrid site has the home page load within a few seconds, and on the home page is a link to the introduction (labeled "Corporate Presentation") for people to view if they want. This way no one is forced to sit through an introduction or immediately repelled from the site by seeing a preloader (the home page of the hybrid does not have a preloader).

Problem 3 - Harder to Update

It took a long time to develop each page of the site, and if a change was neeeded – no matter how small the change – William Pear International needed to contact us to fix it. This method of updating proved to be illogical once William Pear International informed us that they planned to have about 100 pages. The price of developing 100 flash pages was much more than redesigning the website into a hybrid.

The Solution: The hybrid website allows us to have a single template that can be used to create many pages quickly – the cost-per-page dropped tenfold. As for changes to existing pages, we developed the hybrid to have a Content Management System built-in, so whenever a small change of the text or images needs to be done, William Pear Internationl can simply log onto their site and make the change. The Content Management System makes changes as easy to do as changing a word document.

Problem 4 - Not accessible to all

Not everyone has the ability to view flash. At the time the website was developed (July 2003), 86.3% of online users in the US had the version of flash used on the website. While that seems impressive at first glance, consider who it is that lacks the flash player. The two largest markets without access to the flash player are large businesses and schools/universities. Both use large networks in which (usually) a common user doesn't have the ability to install new software (in this case, flash). Usually set up years ago, if they do have flash it is an older version. Since William Pear International's target market is Fortune 500 companies, this was a problem.

The Solution: By developing the hybrid, all the important content was text based and can be viewed by all browsers and all operating systems. Flash was used solely for aesthetics and increasing brand recognition. The most common flash object was a banner displayed at the top of the home page. If one viewed the website without the flash player, he would see an image alternative that represents the flash movie they are unable to see. By keeping essential information like content and menus text-based, we were able to ensure it could be seen by anyone - including search engines.

Conclusion

These problems are common to many flash websites. Yet flash isn't all bad; it can allow one to add functionality and visual elements not attainable through traditional website development. Before generalizing and saying "Flash is always great" or "Flash is always bad," take into accounts the goals of the website and whether flash will add to the value of the website or detract from it. It isn't the technology that is implicitly bad, it is how it is used. Make sure, if you choose to use it, you use it for the right reasons.