If you own a business, an online presence is a must these days. You need to have a proper website, good enough to attract the attention of the visitors. And you have to ensure that the visitors who come to the site should spend some time there. Only then you will be able to reap some benefits out of it. This is where a great web design plays a major role. Along with high-quality content provided in the website, the design also determines the time spent by the visitors on the website. And a number of components are incorporated to make a website look great. These include images as well as different types of videos. Among them, flash videos, of course, are quite popular.
But are the flash videos the right things to include while designing websites? Flash is able to add a touch of animation to your otherwise static website. There might be a few other advantages as well. This is, no doubt, one of the most amazing things you can add. But the cons of using this component in a website usually outweigh its pros. Here’s a quick sneak peek into the matter.
A Long Time to Load
Flash is one of the basic software that can help you add some animation to your website. But the problem lies somewhere else. Once you add a flash-based animation to your website, it takes a long time to load. And it is one of the worst things in terms of user friendliness of a website. Besides, researches have shown that flash-based websites easily distract the users and hence, it is advisable not to use this software to create videos. That can, in fact, have a negative impact on the usability of the website, thus reducing traffic to a great extent.
Difficult to Share or Bookmark
Whenever you are creating a website, one of the most important things that you would want is to find it high on the search engine rankings for several keywords. However, for this, you need to have a website that can be perfectly optimized for search engines. But this is going to be difficult if you are planning to go for a flash-based website. Individual links for internal pages are usually absent in many of the flash-based websites. This link structure of the flash-based website is not SEO-friendly and hence, does not help in the search engine rankings. Besides, as the URL of the individual pages are not present, it will not be possible for the users to bookmark the pages or share the relevant links. This, in turn, leads to less footfall in your website.
Not Compatible to All Devices
These days, the practice of viewing the websites is not limited to the desktop computers only. With every passing day, lots of mobile devices are being introduced. And almost all of them are internet friendly. So, a lot of people are going to view your website on a smartphone or a tablet. However, if you are planning to design the website with the help of Flash, just wait. It is not possible to create a Flash website, which is compatible to different devices. So, in many of the mobile devices, the Flash-based websites do not run at all. And this is only one of the many disadvantages that they can have. Hence, you are likely to lose out on a large number of visitors to your website. This, in turn, is expected to have a negative impact on your balance sheet.
How Important are Flash Videos?
Is it really important to add flash videos in your website? These videos usually are used only for introduction. You can hardly provide any serious information through the Flash videos. But it is only the information and data for which the visitors come to your website. So, it’s absolutely of no use to cramp your website with Flash videos. If you add some videos in the introduction to just make it more attractive, it might have a negative impact as well. It will slow down your website and hence, visitors who had come to find some information might leave the website.
Easy to Create with Other Programs
The features that Flash offers on a web page can be achieved otherwise as well. There are several programming languages, which help to create the same things that are developed on the website with the help of Flash. Some of these programming languages include:
- HTML
- CSS
- Javascript
Hence, there’s absolutely no reason why you would need Flash to design the website. Yet, you can make it as attractive as you would like, thus ensuring that people will spend quite a long time there.
Since its earliest days, the concept of web design has evolved significantly. Flash videos, which used to be extremely common even a few years back, are hardly found in the world of web design these days. This is helping the websites quite profoundly, enhancing traffic and, in turn, increasing profit in the long run.
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