Need Opinions Re: Use of Flash in Websites

[ladymsdiva]

how much is too much? can search engines read flash? what annoys you the most about the use of flash?

this is my site www.djkasha.dx-t.net. what do you think?

[worthyashes]

Nice site.

In answer to your questions re search engines - SE can't read flash swfs but can crawl the html that they are loaded in. Not great, but something. If you're really keen to have a flash site that can be read by search engines you need to do alot of work. Basically you need two sites, one flash and a mirror HTML. Using anchor tags in flash and redirectors in the HTML pages then you can redirect people to the correct part of your flash movie. Personally I don't like doing this as I'm a coder and this method relies on structuring your flash nav down the timeline. This in't great as you'll generally end up with a nice fat flash swf.

The other way to do it is to use swf2html. Can't remember the link but it's on the Adobe site. This extracts html out of your swfs that you can then add Meta to. Not great again but probably will have some effect if used in conjunction with google xml.

The best way is probably to use flash where appropriate and html where you need it to be accessed by SE.

However IMHO you've got to pick the right technology for the right task. If your site is mainly aimed at people who will visit on recommendation, word of mouth or directly from a meeting with yourself then go for it - flash it up have fun and don't worry about SEO. If you need to be up the lists on google - HTML.

Sorry to go on a bit.

(Having said all that our site is entirely flash : ) )