Hello all,

I have a situation a brewing.

A client of mine wants a site made entirely in flash - mostly for aesthetics. The only "real" aspect of the website that needs flash is the intro slide show piece on the landing page. However, he wants parts of the navigation bar to animate when scrolled over, uses of animation going in and out when a new page is clicked, etc. It all looks very nice, but I am worried on its practicality.

The issue I am having is that the originally small website is starting to become really large with at least 15 pages of content - granted most of the pages are only one or two paragraphs and an image.

I am starting to think that the flash site might be a little cumbersome on size and seo optimization.

Does anyone have any tips?

Greatly appreciated,
Mike

@Mikeface:
If you know how to do all of that with Flash, I would go ahead and just do it with Flash, given the fact that it will take a while to learn the skills needed to do it another way. Build a sitemap so that the pages are visible to search engines, because in particular if the navigation is all Flash, it will be hard for the spider to navigate. If all the text content is also in Flash, you're going to have big problems, so either consider not worrying about search engines, or hiding regular text on the page so that it will show up to the spider.

Everything you are describing can be done with JavaScript + regular HTML. You may want to consider learning a JavaScript framework to help you with animation, etc. I recommend jQuery. You may not have time to learn it now, but it will help you in the future.

Thanks for the reply,

I mentioned to the client that there might be search engine problems with it, and he would be ok with it. He just wants it so that the index page would show up and then users would go from there. It's a very niche market that I am making the site for, and the site is more of an introduction on the products and where they are located. I still get the "this is a bad idea" impression when I am working on the site, but at least it will look nice when it's complete hopefully.

So question here:

Would it be possible to have a navigation menu in flash as a .swf, and then load the content as html text on different html pages?

That might sound confusing, but here is the site I am struggling to create:
http://www.modenafinefoodsdev.hostzi.com/

would it be possible to have that same navigation menu on the left, and when users click on the menu buttons, the side scroll function thing occurs - but then it could load the html pages???

That would be somewhat easy / still look decent.

@Mikeface - Yes, it's possible, but if you're just trying to implement the navigation system using Flash, I would recommend against it. Take Vangogh's advice (above) and implement it with JavaScript/CSS and possibly AJAX.

And just to add to the general conversation, I think Flash definitely has it's place and AS3 is very nice from everything I hear. I look at it the same way I look at Java applets. Use them when you have to.

It's sad that we have so few choices in these "all-encompassing" browser plug-ins. Silverlight doesn't seem to be gaining ground, Java slacked off for a long time - only with Java 6 are we starting to see some real performance improvements, and JavaFX was a major let down.

A lot of people like to say that Flash based web sites are pretty/sharp/unique etc., and I agree with a lot of them, but just as a regular surfer (even with a highspeed connection on a fast computer), I can tell you that any web site that appears to be entirely Flash based, or even has a Flash intro I'm forced to wait through, will immediately cause me to click the browser stop button and find another resource - or competitor

Originally Posted by Mikeface

Thanks for the reply,

I mentioned to the client that there might be search engine problems with it, and he would be ok with it. He just wants it so that the index page would show up and then users would go from there. It's a very niche market that I am making the site for, and the site is more of an introduction on the products and where they are located. I still get the "this is a bad idea" impression when I am working on the site, but at least it will look nice when it's complete hopefully.

Just for information, I have done some fully flash sites and have found that there are ways around their SEO issues, I do not like the idea of having hidden text just for spiders because this can sometimes seem like black hat, however there does not seem to be the same issue when using alternate content, you can take a look at the application called swfobject, this should get you going.

What you are going to end up with is two sites in one, your flash site will show up when the user has the correct version of the flash player installed and if they do not they will see your alternate content version, that could contain anything you like, HTML, Javascript, PHP, etc. Great you have killed two birds with one stone, your reader sees the content either in flash or html, but at least they see something, your search engine spider does not look at the flash side, so it sees the alternate content with indexable text and links etc. So everybody is happy, except for you, cause you had to design two entire websites for the price of one, and hardly anybody will even know the other one exists.

By the way, Search engines will look into this a bit more carefully to ensure that the content of both are the same, or at least very very similar to make sure you are not trying to pull something funny.

I hope this helps somebody.