Flash is dead, HTML still alive

We have all seen pages, where content moves smoothly and clicking makes navigation "floating" nicely. That is absolutely true, that flash enables creation of pleasing layouts and such pages look great. At the same time, most of the people are not so aware about shortfalls of this approach.

The first and most troubling is, that websites made in flash are not indexed by search engines. Those texts, which are inside animations are not visible enough for search engine crawlers, so they are not used for evaluating pages content relevancy. It may impact greately the visiting statistics, whether your webpage comes up well in searches or is buried in the 250 page of Google search results.

Learned blindness by users may create negative impact in the cases when your webpage looks like huge animated advertisement banner. Most of the internet users have learned to ignore everything what is highly animated and looks like advertising - it just doesn't look like trustworthy source of information. 

Perhaps the greatest problem with flash is that it is not usable at all through Apple mobile devices like iPads and iPhones. With huge raise of popularity lately, increasing number of visitors doesn't see anything on their screens. We have experienced new wave of clients, who need their old flash webpages to be converted to standard HTML lately.

Good is that you don't need to say no to animations per se - there are just more trustworthy technologies available. For example, javascript slide shows with conventional jpeg pictures enable showing first slide even on brausers where javascript is not available. So, is the use of video all bad? Not at all, embedding product introductions, testimonials, instructional materials in video format is great way for living up your webpage, just be sure that you present information in a way, what is visually pleasing and accessible at same time. 

Read more about embedding YouTube videos to your webpages.