Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal has posted a good piece by SEOResearcher.com writer Oleg Ishenko outlining five reasons Flash is not an optimial option.
“Flash Is Evil. Five Big Reasons Not to Use Flash”
1/ Flash requires bandwidth
Despite of the DSL Internet access being available almost everywhere, there are still lots of people surfing the Net via dialup or other limited bandwidth connection. Flash files, especially those using sound effects, embedded movies or bitmap images, can take a while to load.
2/ Disabled back button
Some Flash designers use meta refreshes or other tricks to disable browser’s Back button. As the famous usability expert Jacob Nielsen says, ‘Back button is the second most important navigation element after hyperlinks’. People not able to use Back button will click the third most important navigation element – that X button in the top right. Besides, if you are going to promote a Flash site via PPC, you should know that Google AdWords doesn’t approve pages with disabled back button.
3/ Flash ignores users needs
Whereas the ground rules of marketing emphasize the concentration on the users’ needs, Flash websites ignore them. Take the infamous site intros and splash screens that are as much annoying as the 45 minutes of advertising and previews in cinemas. Or another example: the sound effects – they are can be especially inappropriate and harmful when you are browsing the Net from a cubicle in a quiet office or from home in the late hours.
4/ Problems with third-party Flash developers
Unless you do Flash yourself, you might face some serious troubles with developers. Some of them code their project to prevent them from editing, thus making you to hire them over and over again as you need to do even the smallest modifications. Aaron Wall in his SEOBook (a highly recommended SEO reading) describes a case of a Flash developer who disabled the back button and then asked $4000 from his client to re-enable it, although the problem was caused by his own incompetence.
5/ Search engines do not like Flash
And perhaps the most important: not every search engine is able to crawl and index the content of Flash movies. Even those that can often do it with errors. This is in particular the case of a website fully implemented in Flash as a single file. Search engines just wouldn’t be able to direct visitors to the proper page within that file.
What is Flash really good for? Banners and ads – it provides far more useful features then the traditional gif animation. Online games – remember the ‘Yeti Sports’? Flash technology – the Flash videos – for video blogs.
But as a website engine – Flash is evil!
Have a question and need quick answers? 
“Flash files, especially those using sound effects, embedded movies or bitmap images, can take a while to load.”
Flash sites that take a while to load are probably my biggest pet peeve next to sites that have music or sound auto-load with them. Even worse is when you have to update your flash plug-in and you reach a site that requires it. It’s a million steps to get to the info that you want, and in the heat of a busy work day, who has time for that when we all know there are probably thousands, if not millions of other sites that will offer us the same information with a lot less hassle.
I find the problem with most of these sites is that the people behind them fail to do the most important thing in web design, or any other kind of marketing, and that is to put yourself in your audience’s shoes.
Great post!
Comment by Courtney — Friday, October 27, 2006 @ 12:11 pm