Wednesday, October 7, 2009

The Use Of Adobe Flash

By Bonita Li

How to use Adobe Flash within a web page? It is definitely a common doubt of many businessmen and managers.

In case you are not acquainted with Flash, it is an animation software which is graphic-based and can make websites look fruitful and interactive. Flash is particularly good at developing different types of interactive content, such as product demonstrations and training modules. However, search engines such as Google cannot "index" the site if the whole site is built by Flash.

There is a simple way to prove whether a web page can be "indexed" or not. On a web page, try to highlight the text, which means the content, by clicking the left button of your mouse and dragging it over the text. If you are able to highlight the text in blue, that means the text of the page are in different "layers", hence it can be "indexed". It is because a web page can only be "indexed" when the text or any graphic on that page are in different "layers", which is essential for search engines to "index" a page as those engines can "index" text-based content easily.

So, what exactly is Indexing? It is the process that Google uses to scan the important details of a website. Google would then store the details in their database for Google users to search websites by keywords. If you create the entire website using Flash only, the text on your web page would be layered into the graphics and Google would then not be able to index your website.

In the old days, it is completely impossible for Google to index content written using Flash. Although there are news saying that Google and Adobe are working towards the goal of making content written using Flash more indexable, there are no test results on whether the attempt is successful or not. Therefore, it is of your best interest to incorporate text-based content in your website and avoid using Flash to create your entire web page.

People like using Flash to create their websites as Flash does not only make a website look more attractive, the interaction that Flash can add to a website also appears functional for users. However, what Google is looking for is text-based content. Thus, there exists a trade-off.

There are business owners who decide to go both ways, just in case. These web pages let users choose between 'HTML Site' or 'Flash Web Site' from the Home Page. Naturally, that is one of the ways to compromise with Google's system, but the workload of managing two web sites at the same time can be unbearable for some of the business owners and their teams.

So how to use Flash within web pages properly? You should develop a compromise between web design, usefulness and search engine optimization. The best way is to integrate Flash files within the entire HTML site design. Then your text-based content can be indexed by Google. On the other hand, your Flash-based content can attract visitors to your site. This can tackle the problem of indexing and make good use of Flash at the same time.

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