Obviously this depends on the use of the flash in the header, the sites content/emphasis and the visitors who will be using it.

As an example I'm intending to use a flash header in a website I'm developing which also contains the navigation for the site. But as I know my visitors fairly well I know that 99.9% will have the corresponding version of flash installed and the site is a media based website too. The other reason for using flash is that it looks pretty sweet and things can be animated too.

But is this a good idea despite what I've just said, would a Javascript alternative be a better idea? Could it effect SEO quite badly and of course there's the other thing which is the larger file size it may bring up. I'm still set on keeping the flash header there but should it be changed for reasons that would really harm the site?

If you're going to put navigation in Flash, make sure you include a TEXT version of your navigation on the page. Flash nav is inaccessible and also invisible to search engines. Case in point - I 'inherited' a site that was done by another company that had 3 links in a FLASH header. The search engines NEVER found those pages because the only links to them we in the Flash header - and the site had been live for a year or two !

That's what I thought, the search engines won't be able to pickup on my navigation structure. I've noticed that some sites have their sub categories of their site listed when you search for them how do people get that on google?

I believe there is an alternative for the "alt tags" used in images for flash banners? I just can't remember what exactly is the tags for flash.

Get the names right!

And the correct tags for flash are <object ...> </object>


@graham08 they are called sitelinks

http://www.webmaster-talk.com/the-go...ight=sitelinks
http://www.webmaster-talk.com/seo-ta...ight=sitelinks
http://www.webmaster-talk.com/the-go...ight=sitelinks

And YOU don't decide whether you get them or not

If you like the look and feel of a flash header then use it, personally I
think flash is better than a boring old flat jpeg.
But like above , just add some text nav links too

Thanks for the advise everyone What I've done is created a flash header without the navigation built in now and used some Javascript to provide the navigation which looks and works fairly similarly. Whilst flash can do some nice stuff for navigation, it doesn't do any favours for running a long-term website really and is therefore better suited to one-off sites really.