Why is there such interest in Flash website Templates? - by Dave Collado

As it gets harder and harder to attract new customers and keep their interest. More and more designers and clients alike turn to Flash website templates in attempt to deal with the incursion of the short attention span generation. With bandwidth no longer an issue and armed with a powerful arsenal of rich media many say Flash is already perched and ready to become the industries weapon of choice.

Even so, those of us who may be closer to finding our inner geek (you know who your are) will be more familiar with the technical issues that surround Flash hence we may appear a little less (pardon the pun) “animated” by all that fancy schmancy. Granted, for every obstacle, and every shortcoming Flash may have had, still has, whatever the case may be, Flash still possess and promises to continue to bring some really amazing virtues to the table. But, there is no justifiable reason that dazzling special effect should ever take the place of good clean HTML content on a website, notwithstanding the majority of Flash antagonist become so, due to the many inaccuracies and misconceptions floating around all over the Net concerning Flash.

Misconception number one - ( The Flash SEO scandal )
The most widely spread misconception is search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine visibility as it pertains to Flash website templates. Sorry to burst your bubble but getting your site indexed on any search engine isn’t easy whatever the underlining technology; search engines are primarily design to index static pages while on the contrary Flash is inherently dynamic. The question then arises. Is the use of Flash website templates then present an insurmountable obstacles or irremediable technical issue to bar proper indexing of these pages. And, if so how is the use of other programming techniques such as dynamically driven database sites and complex URLs (a common practice also facing similar challenges) become such common place or differ when it all comes down to search engine ranking? The answer to these questions must necessarily come from the search engines themselves and the information they provide concerning dynamic Flash sites and complex URLs. See Google Webmaster Help Center answers to Does Google index sites that use Macromedia Flash? - Does Google index dynamic pages?

What are Complex URLs?
Generally complex URLs read as follows http://foamers.net/sample.php?type=flash&details=gallery. Pages or links used to access this kind of URLs are dynamic, meaning that the content of the page can vary based on the value of the data being passed to the script (script in this case refers to sample.php) creating the page. Notice the parameters (also called a query string) being passed as name=value pairs to this script beginning at the question mark (?) each pair is also separated by an ampersands (&). The script then parses these values to determined which content (or page) it should serve; if on the other hand the topic parameter were to change one could expect to see an entirely different page. As you might imagine these types of URLs could confuse or even momentarily trap the spider by looking as if there were an infinite number of pages within just the one site. Needless to say, me Google crawler no like.

Notwithstanding dynamic pages such as these are simply too useful to avoid. Moreover there are many simple ways to amend the dynamic URLs potential issue, such as through the use of https rewrites and the like… Likewise Flash interactivity is simply too functional to ignore, and any thing else you need to do to make your Flash website template more amicable for the search engine bots to traverse is well worth the extra effort. Why? Well, for starters Flash is capable of utilizing sever-side scripts, it can also be used to assure client-side data validation, make interactive games, embed movies, music and lots of other cool stuff… Listen, it’s perfectly natural to feel a little uncomfortable and even afraid around anything you may not easy get right away; but that’s no reason to call it evil. Case in point Google uses Flash to display users video search results, better still; the popular YouTube website which uses Flash to play movies uploaded by users.

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