Website Design – What Works Best, Flash or Traditional?
When deciding on the design of your new site, you’ll need to choose whether or not you go for a ‘Flash’ website or a more traditional, ‘Static’ website (built through HTML, WordPress etc.).
Now, by Flash I don’t mean ones that look attractive & flashy, but ones that have a whole heap of audio, video or animations that automatically start as soon as someone visits the site. You can have a video embedded on your site, & that’s not considered a Flash site – it’s those that pretty much stop the visitor from doing anything until the display is over etc.
Personally, I’d really recommend you steer well clear of Flash websites in spite of what your web designer may say (who more than likely has no idea about the internet marketing side of things). Flash websites are not only expensive to have built, but from my experience are a complete waste of money, with simpler and cheaper, static (still) sites giving much better results.
Why?
- Flash websites invariably take some time to load, even on broadband connections. For those still on dialup it is painfully slow to the point that they’ll probably leave before the sites even loads.
- Some people running older computers may not be able to view the site correctly.
- Google will penalise sites that are slow to load – not only in natural search engine results, but as of 2008 they started factoring in the website loading time to how much you have to pay in Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. In short, if they think your site is slow to load you’ll have to pay more for PPC advertising!
- From a personal point of view I ‘run a mile’ when I hit a site that has Flash applications on it & will use a static site in preference. To me, a site loaded with Flash applications indicates a business that is more interested in it’s outwards appearance rather than learning/understanding basics of website marketing. People/businesses who are so concerned with ‘outer appearance’ often have a ‘hollow inner’.
It comes across to me as rather rude for a business to expect people to sit through a long Flash display before they can view what they want on the site, & as a result I don’t want to know them. I know not everyone thinks the same way, but I can guarantee I’m not the only one who thinks this!
