Just Say "No" To Flash Based Websites! 

Today one of the biggest buzzes on the Internet is a technology called "Flash". You see it everywhere from YouTube, to virtual tours, to on-line games, to streaming music media.  Flash is everywhere! But in the midst of this Flash craze, real estate agents are going as far as developing their entire sites in Flash. Real Estate CPR hopes to show you, the real estate agent, why we completely discourage against this method of web design. Sure we use Flash in some of our applications, but by no means do we support completely designing sites exclusively in Flash. Please take some time to read this article if you have been considering having a website developed in Flash>

1. Flash Cannot Be Indexed By The Search Engines: Google (and other search engines) cannot index the contents of your Flash website because your website is more or less an encrypted movie. The example to the left shows how the search engine interpret your Flash website. It more or less looks like black box because they cannot see text inside of your Flash movie.

Developing your site to be contained inside of Flash movie is like saying that search engine traffic isn’t important to you - and I’ve almost never encountered a site for which that is true (it’s definitely not for real estate sites!) Search Engine traffic is the most important element of owning and running a website. But to get traffic, it is import to allow the search engines to find and index you in their databases. Building a site in Flash hinders your efforts quite a bit. There are ways around this but most of them are frowned on. One was is to present so-called doorway page that delivers an alternate text version of your site when the GoogleBot stops by to index you, but this is just bad news. It actually got BMW and Ricoh’s German websites delisted from Google (which is a lot like disappearing from the web). Another way is to use JavaScript (or a similar technology) to detect whether the Flash plugin is installed and to redirect to an HTML-based version of the site if it isn’t, and most search engine bots probably don’t report having Flash installed, and they probably won’t penalize you for redirecting for all non-Flash visitors rather than just them, but then again you’re just paying more to build a Flash version and the HTML version you should have built in the first place.

2. Flash Breaks the Back Button: When you’re inside of a Flash movie, the browser still thinks you’re on the first page that loaded (i.e.: the one containing the Flash movie and not a frame inside the movie) and so Back will take you to the page before the one you’re on (i.e.: not the one with the Flash movie). Back is the second most often used browser control (after links) and jumping out of your movie will annoy your visitors every time they try to use it. It is possible to build Flash movies that use the Back button (see Flash Magazine’s Making the back button work for Flash), but it’s rarely done (and even less rarely done properly).

3. Flash Doesn’t Print: When site visitors print the page containing your Flash movie, they will almost always see an empty rectangle where your beautifully developed movie used to sit. It is possible to make Flash movies that print (see Peach Pit Press’ Flash MX Printing sample chapter from Certified Macromedia Flash MX Developer Study Guide), but it’s a time consuming extra step that most designers don’t consider. I wish it were the case that people never printed off the web, but we know lots of people who do, especially when considering buying a home and wanting the ability to print off different models to show their friends and family.

4. Flash Movies Have A Single Entry Point: You may have the best looking, most original, all-singing, all-dancing Flash production in the history of the Interweb, but people can only enter from the very beginning. There’s no way to bookmark a page inside of your website (e.g.: I can’t return directly to the unit I’m thinking of buying), and there’s no way for me to send a link to a friend (e.g.: Hey honey! I found our perfect new condo, but you’re going to have to navigate through this really complicated Flash movie to find it). For the record, there are some techniques for enabling bookmarking inside of Flash, but they seem to be PC only (e.g.: see Bookmarks in Flash!, although half the comments are spam).

Jacob Nielsen: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html. Bruce Clay: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2006/03/why_your_pages_1.html

As a website owner, one of your main focuses should be getting listed in the "organic" listings of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN, most notably Google).  You want to be indexed so that people can find you. That is the bottomline. We have never met one website owner who says that search traffic is not important to them. People are searching on-line! This is where your customers are, so obviously, this is where you should be too. Your website listing in the search engines should be right under the mouse pointer of where your customers are when they search on-line. Statistics show that over 77 - 85% of home purchases orginated online in 2006. Next year this percentage is going to grow higher and higher and higher and higher. Chance are though, you are nowhere to be found. Let Real Estate CPR develop for you a properly designed, quality application that will put you in the search index and give you clients a quality experience.