Allchorn Design

Since I’ve recently taken a step back from certain aspects of website design and development (specifically hosting, coding and marketing), I’m delving more and more into the layout and aesthetic concerns of creating a website. That doesn’t mean that I don’t go through the proper discovery steps that precede the design phases, but since I am only consulting on the other topics, the meat of my work is design now.

Being back in the creative cockpit has made me look at ways of sprucing things up using either some slick AJAX or Adobe Flash.

If you know me, you’re probably gasping at the fact that I’d even consider Flash, but I have had a look at things, and if I can pull it off semantically and without interfering with any search engine visibility, I am willing to give it a bash.

The Pitfalls of Flash

My main reasons for not using Flash (on the most part) in the past:

1. Search Engines cannot index flash content (without some form of trickery involved)
2. Sections within a Flash site cannot be bookmarked in the traditional sense either using your browser’s bookmarks OR something like Delicious.
3. Without strict control by someone that knows the pitfalls, it can easily be abused and prove detrimental on a project’s final outcome.
4. Circumventing reason 1, 2 and 3 can add unnecessary time and budget to a project that would make little sense when it comes to ROI.

These have been my major gripes with the use of Flash in the past, although as I’ve also stated in the past, it’s a brilliant and versatile technology that when used correctly for the right thing, it’s results can be amazing.

I reckon that certain aspects of Flash are not going to be changing in any sort of hurry, and as such, I will only make use of Flash when there is either a damn good reason, and that it doesn’t harm things that would be done more effectively in another way. Sometimes KISS just makes more sense.

How Can Flash Be Used Effectively?

Since most of my sites and my client’s sites are built to perform some form of business function, I am pretty sticky on the fact that good, valid, semantic HTML styled with CSS is a must. I think very few people would dispute that fact.

I do very few don’t do Flash only sites, and there are not a lot of industries that can benefit from them. Sure, my friends over at Prezence do a lot of all Flash sites for music artists, movie launches and the like, but that is a very specialised market, and requires the visual versatility that Flash offers. Paul Tooze at Wireframe also does some amazing Flash projects for his clients, but suffice to say, a lot of it is educational and or best suited to Flash’s abilities.

Sure, HTML and CSS could be used to create the “aesthetic” that both Prezence and Wireframe create, but does not offer the same fluid animation and slick motion you can get with Flash. Javascript has come a long way, but it’s still limited and subject to considerable browser issues. Flash however, with it’s pervasive adoption is the ideal candidate to do what it does, and might I add, without any serious competition.

Okay, so you get that I’m not going to be making an HTML document and throwing an SWF (pronounced swiff I believe) file in the middle and doing the rest in Flash. For my clients, that would be search engine suicide!

I am looking at ways of including semantic content for things that are already in the Flash files, and there are some options. One of them is having the content in normal code, and somehow not displaying it (pointless to visually duplicate the content), so the search engines can index you for what you are all about.

There are ways of doing this that will get you penalised by the SE’s but there are some work arounds. Nothing completely fool proof at this stage (or that I can find), but advancements are being made.

Eric Enge discusses this in more depth with his SEOMoz invitiational blog post on A Comprehensive Guide to Hidden Text & Search Engines.

I think the best way to approach this whole thing is the use of flash sparingly, and only as loose elements where they are absolutely required to give some of that visual “wow” factor.

As you might have noticed, I am not referring much to “dynamic” flash where it connects to a database, or has an external XML ot TXT file to feed it content. I’m assuming that this is done if it’s needed. It still doesn’t get indexed by SE’s, hence my search for a viable semantic workaround.

Where To From Here?

Well, I am going to be doing some intensive reconstructive surgery on this website which will be ready in the next few months. Still using Wordpress as my CMS, and still having a good dose of HTML content, but with some embellishments that you’ll either love or hate.

Being the fact that SEO on a website designer’s site is like spending money on marketing the sale of bottled salt water at the beach, I doubt I’ll damage my search engine rankings much.

Right now, I need to dive back into the storyboarding for the new allchorn.com!