Flash Website Design

Flash is a method by which animated graphics on your website is delivered. A flash intro is an animated introduction to your website. They can be exciting and even provide a good introduction to you and your business.

Adobe Flash, initially known as Shockwave Flash and popularly called simply Flash, refers to both the Adobe Flash Player and to the Adobe Flash Professional multimedia authoring program. Adobe Flash Professional is used to create content for the Adobe Engagement Platform (such as web applications, games and movies, and content for mobile phones and other embedded devices). The Flash Player, developed and distributed by Adobe Systems (which acquired Macromedia in a merger that was finalized in December 2005), is a client application available in most common web browsers.

Initially focused on animation, early versions of Flash content offered few interactivity features and thus had very limited scripting capability. More recent versions include ActionScript, an implementation of the ECMAScript standard which therefore has the same syntax as JavaScript, but in a different programming framework with a different associated set of class libraries. ActionScript is used to create almost all of the interactivity (buttons, text entry fields, pick lists) seen in many Flash applications.

As the full flash sites are not very search engine friendly, flash banners, specifically, flash header banner (the banner that goes on the top part of your website), has gained quite a bit of popularity. With flash banners, you can make your website search engine firiendly but still embed a flash banner to make your website pleasant enough to get visitors attention. With table-less CSS based Xhtml or HTML5 you can place the banner underneath your tect content so search engines read your content first and non-readable flash banner last.

Did I hear you say that flash is not meant for you? You may be right. Honestly, incorporating flash files into website designs is not fancied by everybody because of the time involved in acquiring the training and skills it requires. Advertisement, animations and a lot of presentations are created using these flash designs; and you should be familiar with that already.

It is advised that you don't choke your website with overweening use of flash. Yes, you shouldn't neglect the use of keywords or keyword phrases just for the sake of flash. That will only make your website appear on perhaps the hundredth result page; you know what I mean. It shouldn't be your portion to have a website with over-used flash when it cannot readily be found by searchers.

If you use flash on the entire website, you will have to put double the work to make it search engine firendly. Search Engine (SE’s) ignores Flash, therefore, you will also need a non-flash version of your website. If you really need to use flash, make sure that you have an alternative textual description that can be understood by SE spiders. Otherwise, you can also use web 2.0 technology to put your content first before your flash designs.

Incorporate CSS navigation and style sheets, doing so makes your navigational menu crawl-able and indexable by SE spider. Using Javascript and Flash do not have the same result – it is unseen by SE spiders. So if you have javascript or flash on your site, you also need to have simple texts of the same message you put in Javascript or flash.