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How Music And Flash Can Hurt A Website

There’s not a direct consensus among webmasters, clients and users as to what can make or break a website, but here’s a quick rundown of what it is that many people can find to be tedious when they click on a link to a site.

Issues With Music

First, music can absolutely diminish credibility and standing that a person might accrue for their websites.  Depending on your target audience, who very well might have an affinity for your music, you must realize that you risk alienating other users who might not acknowledge your musical tastes or find that due to having music cued in the background, the webpage takes a considerable amount of time to load.

Problems Attributed To Flash

Second, using flash in your website can hurt the time that you’ve invested in your site.  Flash unmistakably has its purposes in the web development world.  It transcends to a whole new level of interactivity for web users much more than CSS or basic HTML.  But if its used in an incorrect fashion, it can damage your site credibility in a lot of ways.

One of the problems with flash for SEO is when an entire website built using flash, search engines such as Google and Bing struggle to scan your site content.  Though sometimes search engines can maneuver a flash site and still be able to follow the links, they don’t have a way of separating your content into relevant pages (the targeted search results).

Let’s put this in another way.  If you’ve got multiple sub-pages all within your flash site, if Google doesn’t manage to find that page and isn’t able to store that information, it doesn’t have a way to link the information on that page.  When Google tries to pull of that certain page in a user’s search results, it simply won’t be able to.  It is only able to direct a user to your home flash page, leaving it up to the user to click through pages until they reach the page that has the information Google has displayed in the search results.

Another problem with using flash websites is maintenance.  Flash websites are notorious difficult to update, especially if you’re new to the task.  A developer can hide clips and scenes all over in a flash document which makes it a cumbersome task just locating the necessary information.  When it comes to editing flash, different programs are needed, and trained developers will be necessary. Both of these can lead to extra costs and extra time, leaving your site without updates for extended periods of time.

Another issue is speed.  Flash sites are almost always going to take a considerable amount of time to load.  A user’s browser has to load the flash player and the entire site.  Take for example a normal site programmed in CSS or HTML.  All of the pages are loaded apart from each other and when a user goes to a home page, only the images and text of the home page loads.  When you go to the “About” page, only the images and text of the “About” page loads.  When using a flash website, all of the music, text, and images for the whole site needs to load all at once.  The site can’t display until all of those elements have been fully loaded on a user’s computer, which can take a considerable amount of time when you’ve got a flash website loaded with content.

At best, flash should be used very sparingly in a website, such as streaming videos, slideshows, animated headers, games, etc.  Everything else should be coded into HTML, PHP, CSS or any other basic web languages.  As it relates to the SEO world, the chief goal is to make things easy for the search engines and users.

Have any questions regarding flash hurting your website? Let us know

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