Posted on Monday 17th of March 2008 at 14:36 in Web Development

Why you shouldn't use Flash to build an entire website

I recently stumbled across an article entitled why your website sucks and though it was worthwhile passing comment on the whole situation; both as an experienced Internet user, professional web developer and usability enthusiast.

The article in question on glyphobet.net is related to this flash based website.  This particular Flash website is a nice effort in aesthetics; making a Wordpress-esque blog entirely in Flash is an interesting idea but it's really more of a demonstration than a pratical solution.  Entirely Flash websites are bad if you're a blogger and I wouldn't recommend them for other purposes either...  Let me explain.

Good sides of Flash websites
The good thing about having a website made in Flash is that it'll work identically across all browsers (provided they have the right version of Flash); this is something that is problematic in conventional XHTML and CSS.  Once the Flash is embedded into the page you should see identical behaviour irrespective of the browser.  You can also use non-web-safe fonts because the Flash movie embeds font data with it (so you're not limited to the same boring combinations).

SEO and Accessibility
Search engine optimisation and accessibility go hand in hand; accessibility is basically how well various browsers (including non-visual ones) interpret your website and it just so happens that search engine spiders are non-visual browsers (well, for all intents and purposes).  Unfortunately an entirely Flash website requires a Flash to be installed for your content to appear; obviously Googlebot doesn't have Flash so it'll have problems indexing your website.

Therefore unless you've got a non-flash version of your website you'll suffer with search engine listings and lack of accessibility.  You *can* make Flash more accessible but it's certainly more problematic than doing so with XHTML/CSS.  SEO and accessibility are my main gripes with 100% Flash implementations.

Things you can do in Flash vs. XHTML/CSS/JS
Sure you can do nice animated headers using Flash but most of these are worryingly awful and detract from the real content.  Banner/widgets like those found on Tradedoubler are very cool but probably achievable in Javascript with frameworks like JQuery, Mootools and Scriptaculous readily available and easy to use.  

Use Flash for widgets and composite webapps but don't build an entire website in it.  Certainly not if you're interested in SEO and accessibility (as all bloggers should be).  I just thought I'd give my $0.02 on the topic.

 

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