Why You’ll Be Slicing Up Your Flash Like Cake

I just concluded a portion of flash development for one of my clients. The site was originally developed by another developer and the flash file was pretty big, okay it was HUGE! I do have one policy when telling stories like this, and that’s not to mention names. I don’t know what the circumstances really were and I can’t say if it was not knowing or just a time crunch but having a Flash file of that size acting as the web site is not good on many levels. For starters the loading time was really slow and for optimization it was at a major disadvantage. Figure this, you have one big Flash file acting as your website and you go to search various topics in Google, how the heck will Google or any other search engine be able to understand your site has the info if it’s one GIANT SWF. The solution is not that hard if you think about it. This website had roughly 16 categories with some sub categories. The first thing I did was take the main navigation menu and direct the buttons to it’s corresponding category, this time around it was being pushed to html pages I hadn’t created yet but I took note of each name I came up with. Later on I created the pages so the buttons would obviously be functional. Following this I took each category(movie) and threw it into it’s own movie. I kept the same background, branding etc etc… to keep everything uniform. After everything was said and done I had a site with multiple html pages being cached by the search engines. Just as important I had a site that was running a lot faster. Now in 2008 I read developers at Adobe contacted Google and offered them support to cache swf. files better for search engine optimization. Meaning that your swf. file would be found much easier and wouldn’t just be left at the sidelines. That was terriffic news for Flash users , but It seems like the news was lost in translation. Many people that hear the word “Flash” think right away that the search engines hate it. This is not the case. Like I said Google is on top of the list for being able to pick up swf.’s very nicely. On the other hand, having the support of a lot more data is ideal and this is where you want your html pages to support and drive data to your site. Their is a reason why you can publish Flash https. This was done to get you to leverage Flash and html for building your website. And this is why you’ll be slicing up your flash like cake as I did. Give yourself the best chance possible to have your web site being found, don’t go throwing up one swf. as your entire site. , it will not give you the upper hand in the everlasting battle of seo practices.

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