Flash Websites = Amateur Hour

Give the people what they want, right? If your client wants a flash website with lots of moving parts, give them that.

Um, kind of, but if you're a professional and your client is a professional, you have a duty to give them all the information they need to make an informed decision about what they really want. If you're designing a site for a nightclub or children's television program, you might want music and lots of animation. Otherwise, it's usually dumb.

What does Flash do for your business? Usually nothing and certainly nothing that can't be done with better, post-1998 techniques.

Think of the biggest, busiest websites in the world -- Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Amazon, YouTube, WikiPedia, Facebook, Twitter. Do any of them have a lot of animation right in your face? No. Not one of them does. In fact, the busiest among them, Google, has the simplest design you will ever see. The ones that do have animation use it very sparingly. Do you see the little animated RSS icon on this site, over to the left under where it says "Subscribe to blog?" That's about as much animation as you should have on a well designed web page, at least automated animation.

Why? Because animation is annoying. Those big websites employ some of the smartest designers in the world, huge teams of the smartest designers in the world, in fact. They have psychologists who test and evaluate their user interfaces. Why do you think they all have relatively simple, mostly non-animated designs? Because, as I said before, animation is annoying. Use it sparingly.

If you do have a video or other animated element to display, get your user's permission before launching it. Nothing is more annoying than an auto-playing video. It screams, "I'm a guy who sells junk on late night TV, and now I have a website!" People know how to click and play the things they want to watch. People hate having things shoved in their faces.

Flash has lots of other limitations as well. Somewhere between 10-20 percent of your website's visitors won't even see your site because they -- like me -- use NoScript or something similar for security reasons. If you do use Flash for the main part of your site, make sure to be a pro about it and deprecate so that people who don't allow Flash can still get the information you want them to get and take the actions you want them to take. Take a look at Yahoo! for an excellent example of graceful deprecation. If you look at yahoo.com with scripts/flash and without it, you see almost the same thing.

Flash hurts SEO. I was looking at a site the other day, much of which was Flash. They had done some on-site optimization but they were coming up on keywords that get "too little data" number of searches each month (i.e., nobody searches for those things). Pity the site had been designed and built by a graphic designer who fancies themselves a web programmer; missed opportunities to snare traffic on some great keywords. But they missed all those keywords. It took ten minutes to discover great keywords in about three minutes using WebCEO (paid affiliate link) and a couple of free Google tools.

(As an aside -- if your SEO people show you that you're coming up on page one for a search term, make sure to ask them how often that term is searched. A common trick of SEO fraudsters is to get a site up on a low-competition term that nobody ever searches for to dazzle the client. But what good is being on page one of Google if only three people a month search for that term?)

If you are a professional webmaster and you have a client begging you for a Flash site, by all means give it to them (Flash sites are very expensive and put a lot of money in your pocket) but be ethical about it and tell them the real deal about good web design so that they can make an informed decision.

Give the people what they want, but steer them toward success.