Using Flash In Your Website? It’s About To Become Extinct!

Flash web design is pretty much dead. I know there are many web designers out there who spent a lot of money to learn how to program in Adobe’s “Flash,” and I feel sorry for them. I’ll admit that when I first saw a website done in Flash, it was pretty cool – and it was tempting to learn some advanced Flash programming skills. However, we decided to refrain due to some of the inherent problems with Flash.

Up until just recently, a website done completely in Flash didn’t get indexed very well by search engines. It is true that about a year or so ago, Adobe provided information to search engines on how to index the text within a Flash website, but it was a little bit too late for that. This was the biggest reason we did not get heavily involved in Flash programming – what’s the point of spending money on a website if no one can find you??

And now, Adobe has killed flash development for mobile devices as of November 9th, 2011. What does that mean for you, if you’re a business owner who’s website is all in Flash? Well consider that Google is reporting that more and more searches are done on mobile devices and in fact, using a mobile device for search is expected to widely exceed searches from laptops and pc’s. So even if a searcher does locate your site, they won’t be able to see it.

Seriously.

You are going to be losing out on tons of sales, walk-in customers – and money. Your Flash website is becoming extinct. I have been predicting this for over a year now, as the local mobile search revolution started to be realized.

If you have a Flash website, grab your mobile device and type the url into the browser. What do you see? Likely it’s something like this – here’s a photo of a Flash programmed website on my Blackberry Torch:

I just randomly found a Flash website, http://bellamystique.com and loaded it. The website detects that the browser I am using isn’t capable of viewing Flash, and gives me the message:

“To enjoy this site you’ll need to update your Flash Player. It’s easy, painless and will take just a moment…”

Then there is a prompt with a clickable button to download a Flash Player… trouble is… it’s not easy, it’s not painless, because there simply does not exist a Flash Player for Blackberry Torches, I-Phones and other mobile devices (there may be for a very few Androids). And with the news that Adobe has stopped development, it means there never will be one available.

Take a look at the photo again and then a wild guess at how much money that business is making with mobile searches?

The grand total of zero dollars.

I feel sorry for both the website owners of Flash sites as well as Flash web developers. The website owner has likely spent good money for a website that they had hoped would do them for a good long time and help them market their business. The Flash developer has either paid good money for training or has spent a great deal of time learning Flash development – and now it seems to them as if Adobe is abandoning them – the anger and bitterness that I’ve read on the blog of the Adobe website speaks volumes.

Here’s what we’re going to do to help. For a limited time, we’re offering a $200.00 discount on a mobile website of up to 10 pages to those businesses that have Flash websites. Our normal price for this is $697.00 but if you act quickly and get in touch with us (email is fine – [email protected] with the subject of “Special Mobile Deal”) or call us at 519-940-3504, we’ll build you a mobile site for only $497.00.

You do have to act quickly though. Hey, I’d like to help everybody out if I could, but we don’t have time to do that unfortunately.

This is the perfect time to get a mobile enabled website. Those who get in on the new mobile revolution now will reap the benefits before those who are slower to do so.

Isn’t it time you stopped losing potential customers and their dollars? Just like those businesses that waited to get a website when the Internet Revolution began the late 90’s regretted their decision to wait, those who wait too long before having a mobile website built will also regret their decision.

Why would you want to lose potential new customers and not be able to communicate your message to existing ones? Send that email now or give us a call.

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