If you know something about the Internet, or something about website design, then you have probably heard of Flash. Flash objects have changed contents on web and is really a great interactive tool, but it is not a good choice for designing commercial websites. Flash being a proprietary technology breaks most web conventions and standards.
Here are few reasons whyyou should avoid using Flash in the website.
- Flash breaks web usability standards – Websites designed using Flash might look perfect, but visitors start to fall apart when they try to use them, since.
- They cannot use back button for navigation, as it is disabled.
- They will not be able to copy information such as addresses, phone number, etc.
- They cannot increase the font size to make the text more readable.
- They will also be not able to bookmark a page within the website.
- Cross Compatibility Issues – It is very important that a website should work in any browser and platform on any computers. For e.g. Flash version 8 was only released for the Windows platform not for the Linux. However after one month, Flash 9 was released for Linux.
- W3C Validation problems – World Web Consortium (W3C) is the primary web standards organization, which provides a free tool to ensure that HTML codes are syntactically correct. However, standard Flash object or files embedded in the current XHTML or HTML version does not validate correctly.
- SEO Problems – Even though Google has collaborated with Adobe, some Flash information is often invisible to many other Search Engines like MSN, Bing, etc. Robots, small software used by Search Engines to scan a website, usually cannot process text embedded in Flash, since information hidden in graphic formats are difficult to find and process.
- Website loading problem – Flash files, especially those using sound effect, bitmap images or embedded movies, can take more time to load the website that will decrease the number of visitors, since people just don’t sit around and wait.
- It Crashes Browsers – If a visitor is not using the latest version of Flash, and if you have used the latest one, then the visitor’s browser will get crashed most of the times. This will not create good impression on your site visitors, and also will decrease traffic to your site.
