Mexico has a long tradition of excellence in visual communication, including graphic design. So it is not surprising that most Mexican companies have the mistaken belief that developing their websites in Flash, with all these types of beautiful images and textures in motion, is the most avant-garde in technology today and therefore good for your online business.
Therefore, many Mexican graphic designers and web developers choose to work and build their websites, using Flash as their preferred technology.
Unfortunately, using Flash technology for commercial sites is a bad option. Flash does not comply with most established web conventions and standards (W3C).
While Flash sites are generally pleasing to the eye, they generally do not meet the minimum established criteria of business-oriented websites.
The big question today is, What will happen to Mexican companies that use Flash applications?
Although Google announced that it would develop improved support for crawling Flash sites in search engines, to this day, the truth is that they never made it a reality. The most successful websites are those that avoid using Flash and things are not going to improve, considering that Adobe made the decision to stop all developments in Flash technology effective immediately.
Adobe Flash comes to an end.
It has been evident for a couple of years that the limitations of the Flash language, action script, in the compatibility of the hardware used for portable processors such as the iPhone, iPad y BlackBerry OS, represents the beginning of the end of Flash development.
Flash's mobile performance was a failure. The growth of such mobile devices has been enormous and will be even more in the future, for this reason, Adobe has confirmed that it will stop all development of mobile versions of Flash Player.
By removing Flash from the mobile market, it is most likely that it will begin to disappear on desktop computers and laptops as well. Currently, developers still have the same questions when they have to create a web application.
How long can you guarantee that your application will work in the future, with all the extra time, money, quality control, employee skills, training and technical support that comes with it?
Based on this information, we can see that there is no good news for the majority of Mexican websites, since they are operated using Flash components within their applications.
To be clear, here are the 8 most important reasons why modern and successful online businesses have nothing to do with Flash and why businesses, who care about their business, should avoid it.
Seven reasons to avoid Flash on business websites
1. Information embedded in Flash is invisible to search engines.
Most Internet browsers begin a Web session using a search engine. Even if you know the domain name, searching through Google or a similar search engine avoids any possible confusion: . com,. net,. eu, therefore, it is better to trust Google to find the “best option”.
As search engines are the gatekeepers of the Internet, it is imperative that businesses maximize their natural visibility in search engines to be found.
Search engines work by scanning information on the web, processing it, and grouping the best combination of information for each user query. Search engines are well tuned to process text, semantically wrapped in tags. Search engine-visible markup is hypertext markup language, which is our specification of a title, headings, paragraphs and links – structural meaning that helps search engines give appropriate weight to each element of text.
Information hidden in graphical formats, such as Flash, is difficult, if not impossible, to find and process. While search engines like Google do their best to extract links and textual content buried in Flash objects, the process is far from perfect. Sites built entirely in Flash often offer very little textual information, so information that a search engine doesn't find is removed from its position.
2. Web reporting in Flash is problematic for navigation.
Web Analytics systems help marketing professionals evaluate the behavior of web visitors on and around a website, providing valuable actionable information to improve the performance of a business website.
The Basic Web Analytics report tells marketers where visitors come from, the pages visited, and where visitors leave the site. One type of web report Google Analytics uses data from web servers based on log files that track all pages, images and downloads served to site visitors.
A second type of information system is based on JavaScript tags that need to be inserted into every page of the site and into every downloadable object. While both types of Web Analytics systems have advantages and disadvantages, Flash-based websites present real problems for both types of Web Analytics reporting tools.
Although Web Log Server based systems may be able to track when a Flash object is visited and it is possible to view a swf file. They are not able to track navigation within a Flash object – so if a site is made up of a Flash object containing multiple sections of the site, the Web Analytics system will see a swf download, but has no idea which parts of the site visited by the visitor or when the visitor leaves the site.
3. Flash breaks web usability standards.
Flash sites may look great, but they start to fall apart when visitors try to use them. Consider a site for a professional services company. The site contains information about the company, its services, case studies and contact information. It is clear that the company invested a lot of time in the planning and development of its website. The site deserves an excellent rating for content and appearance.
When browsing the site, try using the back button on your browser. Unfortunately, it is disabled.
Try highlighting contact information to paste into contact manager such as Thunderbird or Outlook – you can't.
Try increasing the font size to make the text more readable. It can't be done..
Try bookmarking a page on the site (or deep linking to a page on an external site). It can't be done.
Sites that have these types of problems usually also have problems with web accessibility.
There are too many examples of sites designed in Flash that have the same problems:
4. Lack of consistent support between platforms.
One of the cornerstones of the web is that a website must work in any browser on any computer – it is the openness and standardization that has made the Internet universal.
Flash breaks the basic principles of web design. Although most Internet users have installed Flash – they don't necessarily have the correct version installed. In fact version 8 was not released even for the Linux platform, blocking users from sites developed for Flash 8 and 9 (Flash 9 for Linux has finally been released, months after the Windows version ).
5. Code embedding Flash objects does not pass W3C validation.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the leading web standards organization, offers a free tool to ensure that the HTML code of a page is syntactically correct. While search engines and web browsers tolerate bad HTML code, a business-oriented site usually wants to minimize the risk that an incorrectly coded page will not be rendered correctly or will be rejected by a search engine's parser. . Page validation eliminates this risk.
Unfortunately, the standard embedding of Flash objects in the current HTML version, XHTML, is not properly validated.
6. Some users disable Flash to avoid Flash-based advertising.
7. Website updates continually require Flash knowledge
A top-performing sharing feature on common websites is fresh content, which is continually updated to reflect the latest company news and industry trends. Pure Flash and Flash navigation sites have a constant need to use a Flash designer whenever new content has to be integrated into the existing site. If this skill set doesn't leave the house, site maintenance becomes unnecessarily complicated.
Note: Bing, Microsoft's search engine, in its guidelines for webmasters writes the following:
“Many web designers use Flash and Silverlight-based animations to display their content. Very often these websites do not offer any meta-titles that can read text data. This makes it very difficult for search engines to obtain a useful network description needed to populate the results heading. The Bing team found that websites using flash were responsible for 21% of all empty caption descriptions for queries in their index. …When titles and/or meta descriptions do not exist on an HTML page, Bing creates a title at a given runtime making maximum effort from external sources of trusted information to populate the title with meaningful data for the search engine.”