I saw a flash template which I was thinking about purchasing. I was thinking about adding e-commerce/oscommerce to this flash template, at a later date. Before buying it, I decided to read up as much as I can about the (in)effectiveness of flash websites. I noticed that this flash website take a little while to load. Other users on the web say that flash websites cannot be optimized by search engines and visitors may get turn off by the long loading time of flash websites. My questions are, is it possible to add e-commerce/oscommerce to a flash website and is it true that search engines cannot rank/optimize flash websites?

Thanks,

wire_jp

Search engines see NOTHING in a flash-only website. All of the 'content' is inside the flash movie, leaving only an embedded swf for a search engine spider to see. No content = no rankings on the major search portals.

Flash sites are also very inaccessible for many reasons. People who have disabilities may not see a thing on your site, can't navigate it, etc. Forget using a screen reader. Then you do have the load times, which on dial-up can be pretty long and people will go elsewhere rather than way.

Use Flash sparsely, but don't make it your WHOLE site if you're concerned about search engines or having anyone but broadband users who are physically perfect viewing your site.

think about it, if you want to sell things on a web site flash will only distract the user from your goods you're selling...

the only use for flash on an ecom site i can think of is probably a short presentation on your home page - even then i would think twice about it

look how the big successful ecom sites do it... fast loading, optimised pages and graphics are part of the success of any ecom site