I really don’t spend a lot of time thinking about flash based sites and how much I love/hate them. If they let me “skip intro”, great. If not, it better load fast.
The other day, I actually found something that would concern me if my company was thinking about implementing a flash based site. I was hanging out on Plurk (I’m Beagooddad), and was talking tacos. Plurkers seem to love to talk about food.
Anyway, I had just eaten one of Taco Bell’s new Queso Crunchwraps and wanted to send a link in the comment as I talked about how much I enjoyed my Queso Crunchwrap. So, I went to http://www.tacobell.com/
The little flash thing started up and I noticed there was a picture of the Queso Crunchwrap at the bottom.
When you click on it, it changes the content on the page. But you are still on http://www.tacobell.com/.
There is no way to email somebody a direct link to the Queso Cruchwrap section of their flash site. There is no way to link to it in my blog.
I decided to press on and issued the “site:tacobell.com crunchwrap” in Google to see if they could see something I couldn’t.
Even Google can’t see anything with a specific link to my cheesy crunchwrap.
That seems like a bad way to brand a company on the internet. It might work fine for a company as well known as Taco Bell. But I bet a smaller company following in their Flash footsteps might be throwing away some web traffic and support because of the trouble that using Flash improperly causes with getting into the search engines and having unique URLs for bloggers and webmasters to link to.
One potential relatively easy fix would be to have a sitemap link somewhere that could show somebody real html links to real html pages of their products.
Does anybody know of any other ways to use flash and still make sure your content is uniquely linkable and also available for the search engines?
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That’s a very stupid example, usually there are different addresses for each page in the site, I’m talking about good ones, also there are many ways to increase a flash site’s SEO, dig into it.
Rashid, I think it is a perfectly good example of something to avoid when building a flash site. Taco Bell did a poor job of designing the site for search engines and for providing individual links that other people could reference which is something anybody developing a flash site should consider when building their site.
Interesting example, and now I want some Taco Bell. I never thought about it that way (I don’t often link to tacos…), but I can see how other sites might find that a major issue for say, a hosting package. I read a couple of your posts and your blog is pretty interesting.
You might want to be careful about how you reply to comments, though, you’re falling into the “defensive webmaster” area.(http://www.diligentdesign.net/approaches/fk-you-5-ways-to-spot-defensive-webmasters/)
I wouldn’t really consider that a problem, but just so you know, In order to create fluidity in a flash website, everything is usually in one file.
Just a quick 101 on flash based sites :
There is no html involved within the actual flash : so no hyperlinks or anything like that(So a sitemap, wouldn’t really work, there is no direct link.). The way a flash based site is usually set up is that there are buttons (clickable elements) and these usually point you to another part of the flash movie. So all navigation is within the flash file itself. There is no way to direct link to a certain part of a flash file, which is why there was none when you searched google.
If you have more than one flash file, it’s a different story, but unless hotlinking is a problem (I don’t see the big deal, they’re usually easy enough to navigate anyway) it’s not really necessary.
Interestingly enough, If you check out some of the other features right next to it (Such as the fruitista freeze or the big bell box meal) They do open in a new window, with their own urls…
Anyway, to be fair, they should have a link somewhere to a non-flash based alternative website.
From the search engines point of view they don’t like heavy flash site they take time open.