We know there are people to say – “Flash is not good for e-commerce website design”. Will you really digest the remarks just for sake? There are wave of polemics and heated disputes around Flash. Eventually, designers get into the controversy – whether to use it or not? Will it render SEO benefits?
Getting out of Turmoil:
Well, we do not intend that designers supporting flash are trying to defend this technology. They are not praising its advantages and possibilities to safeguard their commercial interests. Rather, it is the great potential and bunch of opportunities that talks sense. Powerful flash e-commerce designs can prove opponents wrong – who are dead against of it.
However, odds and issues are there in terms of poor search engine ranking or delayed download time. But, for any e-commerce website visual website also remain crucial. The reader may not enjoy reading HTML or text; rather prefer flash as it is more appealing.
Know your visitor’s interest:
In fact, E-commerce website design differs from regular and static web page design. It needs high attention of the reader towards the product. If you only aim to rank high on search engines, the chances are there, you will miss the desired eyeballs. Who knows – interactive flash can bring your visitors for call to action.
Seeing is believing:
Yes, you won’t believe it, unless seen some good flash collections. As an advanced multimedia platform (audio, video, animations, image) Flash can be the prefect way to snazzy up your business website. You can use it to make web based training programs interactive, create tests, and even games. It can really provide your website the wow factor.
Winning steps for designers:
Now, you may be wondering what big difference a flash site can bring to you irrespective of all search engine hurdles. Do the positive aspects really overcome negative ones?
To answer it – Yes, for sure, provided you follow some basic rules. Website designers can bypass the hurdles associated with flash based e-commerce site design.
Optimizing Flash sites:
Here are the tips for designers:
- Do not just fill the pages with flash and graphics.
- Create separate HTML pages for every flash page to get SEO benefits. Flash movies can be installed on HTML pages, therefore visitors can see the flash and search engine spiders can crawl through the HTML pages. No script strategy is one such way to create all the necessary HTML elements (and even CSS elements) and make HTML version of the flash websites.
- In put Meta data. Flash development tools can add Meta data to your movies. So, no excuse for website optimizers.
- Use Flash Search engine SDK. It s an advanced tool that extracts text from Macromedia flash files and writes the standard output document in a HTML file.
- Review and restructure the HTML text for duplication issue, font color, background color.
- Use modern tools that visually show you what from your Flash files is visible to search engines and what is not. It can be really useful SEO analysis
- Flash site optimization method differs for Javascript enabled and disabled site. So follow the correct insights.
It shows a little extra SEO work can wipe out the entire stigma from goodness of flash sites. Those, who still hate even thinking of applying flash, really need a break today.
Limitations are there to overcome. That’s exactly what modern web designers must eye for.
wow! somebody talk about flash and SEO again… This is good. I never thought that flash is bad for SEO the only thing that bugs me is the amount of extra work that you have to do in oder to attain the rankings from the desired key phrases.
and on the other hand internet is getting faster day by day and good flash may take longer time to load comparatively more then a normal HTML page and here comes the issue of user experience. like if you are selling the same thing and you got some competitors without flash why would one gonna waste his time buying the same thing when he can buy it quicker and easier (lets face it human mind do think like that)…
You cover some great point but user experience and time load are still the question marks…
Are there international limitations/concerns creating a Flash-based site?
Just research on the average internet speed in country of your target audience – you can get an idea how fast the flash would load there. There are still many countries where dial up is common but I don’t think you would be targeting them anyway..
There’s a place for everything in ecommerce. While I generally place the most importance on getting rich text as high up on the page as possible, I agree that Flash can be useful to draw the viewer’s attention to the products and engage with them that way.
Thanks for the time it takes to present these! Look forward to them every week.
e-commerce web growth professionals who have been experts in Secured Shopping Cart Software as good as PHP Web applications. Often it is seen in operative category people which they do not have sufficient time or it can be pronounced which they do not get time to go outward or emporium withdrawal in reserve a little shopaholics. This post is some-more ominous to E-commerce…
This blog tells about Flash and SEO, really appreciated. I would love to know about SEO as well as flash how it affected to ecommerce web site. This article has really helped to clear my doubt. Thanks for sharing the information.
I currently own a business and sell the top flash ecommerce based product available, and can tell you that we have overcome the limitations of search engine visibility a long time ago. We product full html pages in a subsystem that allows search engines to have SEO friendly links directly to products, full product titles, descriptions, pricings, reviews, specifications, etc. for every product and it’s all done underlying a flash system if the user has the player. Mobile users have thier own set of needs, so they get their own html version of the system, just like standard ecommerce sites, their heavy front sites are riddled with issues that a mobile users would see.
In fact, the flash systems we operate on are probably more advanced SEO friendly than the html counterparts, as we can feed them individualized titles, meta data, and content code for every single product, where html sites may not go this extra step for individualized products, or try to extract that themselves rather than individualizing it.
I am still a big believer that the page by page mentality of the web has not gone away yet, and a more application centered web 2.0 has not taken off like it could. With older dial-up concerns of page by page downloading gone by the wayside, we are still using an ancient platform. now we can download an entire application, ready to use on your computer, in a couple seconds… but enough of me talking… I could go on and on :)