Adobe Flash is a very powerful platform for making a variety of interactive applications for the web. Most games are built using it. Many of the popular video players use it. Interactive maps, forms and more are all generally built using it. If it’s cool, it’s likely to be built in Flash. One quick way to find out if something is made in Flash is to move your cursor and right click (control click on a Mac) over the element. If a short contextual menu comes up that includes “About Adobe Flash Player,” you’re looking at Flash.

Adobe Flash icon

Accessibility

With something so cool, how could it be bad? Using Flash on your website isn’t bad as long as it used in moderation. Having your website use nothing else is bad for a few reasons. Accessibility is one. People who use browser tools (or special browsers) that assist them by reading the information on the page out loud, need properly coded pages. These tools cannot read most Flash content as it’s presented. There are guidelines for making Flash more accessible, but they are rarely used and even if they are followed, they cannot be read as easily as a simple web page.

SEO

Another reason to not use Flash for your entire website, or for your important content, is search engine optimization (SEO). The major search engines have made some progress in getting their website indexing robots (“bots”) to recognize content within a Flash file. There are also techniques and tools to assist you in making the content more accessible to the bots, but in the end, it just means more work for you (or your web developer). For a website that is entirely Flash, you essentially have to create two versions of the site, one for humans and one for bots. If you’re using Google Analytics to see how people are using your website, you are also giving yourself extra work by creating a Flash website. Every click has to be accounted for because the URL of your page will never change in a Flash website. The user stays on the same page the entire time they are on your website.

Device Compatibility

There is no Adobe Flash Player for iOS. That means your cool interactive website element will not work on the popular iPhone or iPad devices. As mobile devices become ever more important, you will regret have a website home page that your customers and prospects cannot view when they are in the field.

If you have video or an interactive presentation, Flash is an excellent tool to use. Just be sure to back it up with content (plain old text and images) so that the bots, and humans, can find (and enjoy) you.