author: Jennifer

Talk to most website designers and most will tell you to be weary of Flash contents when building your site. While the temptation is great to use Flash to deliver an impressive and flawless presentation to your clients, such usage may also bring about other problematic issues. Perhaps the most pressing one of them all is the fact that search engines, like Google and Yahoo!, are not able to crawl through the dynamic contents in a flash set up.  This makes it impossible for search engines to rank these webpages and link users to them.

However, times have changed and technology is starting to catch up. Adobe System Inc. has just announced that they are releasing a customized version of its Flash Player software, which enables search engines, like Google and Yahoo!, to “see” the elements of the webpages embedded in the Flash files. While they have been indexing static texts and links on Flash sites for some time now, a lot of the newer ones are generated on demand.  By improving what search engines’ crawlers can recognize, it will enhance the user’s search results.  It is exciting to see that search engines are starting to look beyond indexing static HTML and move into dynamic data.

What this means for web developers is that they don’t have to avoid Flash like the black plague anymore and use it to establish aesthetically pleasing websites. With Flash, there’s a higher degree of freedom than sticking with HTML as it allows designers to place objects anywhere on the page without limitations.  This also eliminates the need for contents to be rendered correctly in each separate browser. Flash can also provide site visitors better interactivity. A myriad of multimedia can be added to the website, such as videos and sounds,  to enrich the experience. This is especially helpful in the application of a demo video for your products or even a spruced up home video to show friends and family!

While this is quite innovative, it is still in the early stages of development and one concern that has been circulating amongst receivers of the news is that this technology would still not be able to bring users directly to a specific page within the Flash site. Only time can tell if this launch will be successful for the future of search engines.  Nonetheless, this provides web designers additional options and makes the searching process a whole lot more efficient! If you’ve never considered building a Flash website due to the lack of ability to be searched, here’s your chance to try it out. Register a domain name with Doteasy today to get started!

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