Five Reasons Why You Don’t Need A Flash Site
- Expensive. Many flash-driven sites will take a long time to build. If a designer is a flash guru, expect to pay big.
- Not Overall Simple. Flash is great for having an interactive web site. But for a business web site where you are selling products, you don’t want to confuse or distract your future buyers, they want things simple.
- An SEO Nightmare. Flash is not very search engine friendly. Although search engine technology is changing every day to accommodate flash web sites, there are many important SEO factors that are being missed that can directly effect your ranking.
- Missing Browser Plugins. There are users on the web that do not have flash installed on their computer and those that will probably never do it.
- Load Time. In a recent survey, web users will now only wait 4 seconds before they will leave a web site. Loading screens are time consuming, if your customers are not patient, you don’t have a chance.
And there you have it. The purpose of this article is not to bash Flash developers. Flash has it’s place on the web and it will continue to for years to come.
Note: You can have a flash-driven web site and a secondary HTML web site. The downside is that maintenance time is doubled.

December 12th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
I completely agree with you. Flash is good for games and presentations but a website should be simple and fast.
- Todd
March 21st, 2008 at 2:12 pm
I think it should also be noted that flash websites are generally harder to maintain than other popular options. If flash Apps are xml driven then they can be fairly manageable but most aren’t.