In a recent article with Entrepreneur magazine Mikal E. Belicove wrote seven reasons why designers and businesses should avoid using Flash in their websites and these included the following.

Cost of Development

According to the article hiring Flash developers costs as much as 2x the hourly rate of javascript/html developers which puts your costs higher.

Speed

Google announced rankings based on site loading speed, and Flash sites are notorious for being very slow to load and can only hurt your performance when users browser your site from less than stellar bandwidth connections.

Accessibility

With Apple announcing no flash support for iPad and other mobile phones not supporting the website you could be cutting out a huge percentage of the internet market from even seeing or accessing your site if there is too much flash content. At the very least you now have to code additional browser detection and route a non-flash browser to a more html friendly version of the website meaning nearly 2x as much work in developing the site.

Usability

FireFox among many browsers don’t come with Flash plugin by default which may force the user to leave site to download and install plug-in, they may not come back.  The flash plug-in could also be disabled or not working properly making usability problems when they access your site.

Perception

Flash was amazing and awe inspiring with its animation, graphics and style but rapidly this has become nothing but fluff and most people can assume flash heavy sites have no real content behind the scenes.

Boredom

Flash is fun the first time, but imagine having to watch the same 2 minute intro over and over again.  Unless your content is very dynamic, flash gets old fast.

SEO

Flash heavy sites don’t allow you to use keywords, links, and other SEO tips to allow spiders, bots to crawl your site and interpret the content.  Flash itself is not SEO friendly and combined with penalties for speed your site SEO may suffer severely as a result.

The article went on to mention that flash is pretty much ideal only for sites related to online games, animations or interactive training/demonstrations.  But also useful for Entertainment industry, in general though most business should minimize to one or two pages and devoid the entire site of Flash.

What is your opinion?

-Justin Germino

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