Flash development guidelines
Due to advances in technology, you don’t have to avoid Flash design elements with your website design anymore. These days, 85% of users have Flash plug-in capabilities. That means only 15% of users either don’t have the capability or have outdated versions.
By adding elements of Flash, you can effectively enhance the overall aesthetics of your website, enhancing your visitor’s experience, while staying search engine optimized. You just need to be sure you’re doing the Flash development correctly. Keep in mind that large Flash files can take a long time to load, which can be annoying for your visitors.
Here are a few tips for keeping your website search engine optimized and user-friendly, while still incorporating Flash elements:
- Provide a skip button – Anytime you incorporate a Flash video into a website redesign, especially if the video is an intro, you should give your visitor the option of skipping it. Don’t force your visitors to sit through a video if they don’t want to. That’s an easy way to alienate your customer.
- Provide static links to support Flash development – This is highly important if the navigation is built into a Flash element. The static links give your visitors a chance to click on a text link if they either don’t have Flash capabilities or don’t want to watch the video. It provides them with alternative means to explore your site so you don’t lose the visitor. This is also extremely important for search engine optimization efforts. Search engines will not rank Flash components, so it’s imperative that you provide some other way for them to “crawl” your site and rank it.
- Provide a loading bar – Nobody wants to sit back and stare at a blank screen while a video loads. Provide a loading bar to let your visitors see the video loading progress.
- Keep the customer involved while the video loads – If the video is large, provide some sort of animated message or art to keep your visitor entertained while the video loads. Even better, give them a series of questions, all of which they will find the answer to in the video. Don’t put a sales message in the video.
- Place your keywords in the meta title and meta description – This also helps with search engine ranking for your website redesign. This is the perfect location to place search engine-friendly words and phrases since the video itself won’t support it.
- Provide a reason for Flash development – Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should. Don’t do it just because your competitor does it. Keeping the Flash elements relevant to your website design will keep your customers interested and coming back for more.
You can make your website redesign even more exciting today by adding in some Flash elements.
Contact us for help and we’ll make sure it gets done right.
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