Flashing your customers could cost you dearly

19 February, 2010

Marketing is inevitable. It is something that every business must do. Now, with your website being a powerful marketing tool that generates interest 24/7, it's important to PRESENT, MAXIMISE and EXPOSE your business so that your prospects, clients and audience can find an interact with you.

When marketing your business online, it is usually broken up into the following categories.

SEO Search Engine Optimisation
Email Marketing (newsletters) and
Social Media

Another consideration when looking at cost effective ways of generating traffic, is to ensure that your site is optimised, by not having a 100% FLASH site.

My very quick overview of Flash.

Pros

Animated features and movies are possible.
Flash content is viewed the same to everyone to has a Flash Plug in on their browser.
Flash is, by the very word, flashy.

Cons

It is much harder to have an All-Flash website listed high in search engines.
Time: it takes much longer for a Flash site to load
Download: it takes more data to download and view Flash sites

In my experience, having an All-Flash is usually a turn off. The frustration of waiting up to several minutes for content to load based on their connection and not being able to bookmark or reference pages on your site means they must endure the process of finding specific features every time they visit.

Text on your site, is what is indexed in search engines, not Flash, so ensure that if you choose to have flash, have captions or text relating to the content in Flash. This is also why you should update and publish content to your website on a regular basis.

Flash takes time to download, so if your audience are in areas with little or no broadband coverage, then it could be a waste of your time.

If your are in the Arts industry and you wish to make it harder for people to save your graphics, photos an games, then Yes, Flash can help, but be sure to notify your visitors that it is in flash and that they will need to have those facilities available on their computer.

Please note, you can still have an interactive photo gallery and not have it in Flash.

The other "issue" with Flash, is that you are unable to view flash sites on mobile devices such as an iPhone.

Have an understanding of your audience and business model to know if you should consider not having your site viewed in these devices.

Flash Introductions take time to download as they are larger files then a non flash site. Always have an option to Skip your Flash Intro, especially if you have repeat visitors.

In summary, be smart. Understand that not everyone has the same resources. If you're a smaller business, make it as easy as possible for them to find you.