Mark Berghausen, Search Quality Team in Google, discusses the best uses of Flash on websites. Although I have always thought common sense was the best criteria for implementing Flash on a site, information like this, straight from the source of the majority of traffic from search, is always useful. So, let me quote the bulleted list right away:

1. Try to use Flash only where it is needed. Many rich media sites such as Google’s YouTube use Flash for rich media but rely on HTML for content and navigation. You can too, by limiting Flash to on-page accents and rich media, not content and navigation. In addition to making your site Googlebot-friendly, this makes you site accessible to a larger audience, including, for example, blind people using screen readers, users of old or non-standard browsers, and those on limited low-bandwidth connections such as on a cell phone or PDA. As a bonus, your visitors can use bookmarks effectively, and can email links to your pages to their friends.
2. sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement): Some websites use Flash to force the browser to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements in a font that the user may not have installed on their computer. A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML — it’s just displayed by an embedded Flash object.
3. Non-Flash Versions: A common way that we see Flash used is as a front page “splash screen” where the root URL of a website has a Flash intro that links to HTML content deeper into the site. In this case, make sure there is a regular HTML link on that front page to a non-Flash page where a user can navigate throughout your site without the need for Flash.

Point (2) is interesting and is almost standard practice, at least it should be. A thought about point (3): do you really need a splash screen? Why not let the visitor get to the real stuff right away and save them time (and money?) instead of risking losing their attention over an animated “check out this cool animation..” intro. One case where I’d use Flash as an intro is maybe when a company has a major ongoing offline marketing promotion, so attacking the visitor with the Flash version of the promotion upon entry to the website may actually yield positive effect because it follows up on the offline marketing communication. Any thoughts on this? Drop a comment.

If you’d rather read the whole post, and perhaps draw your own conclusions, go over to Google Webmaster Central on BlogSpot.

Share This