Do B2B Customers Prefer Flash?

Original Post  - Oct 30, 2007

You’ve seen those flashy (pun intended) sites covered in animation and sound. Sure they seem slick and sophisticated, but do those really work in the B2B environment? Let’s take a look at some of the issues:

• According to Adobe (the maker of Flash), 99% of Internet viewers have Flash installed.
• Flash content is not accessible by search engine crawlers, making it invisible to search engines (doesn’t help SEO).
• Flash content is also not usable by persons using a text reader, and by many mobile phones (for now).
• Visitors have to sit through Flash content to get to the information they need. And if visitors can’t find information quickly on your site, they’ll go elsewhere.
• There are some types of information that can only be conveyed visually (or are better conveyed visually) with or without sound which can be done better with Flash than on a webpage.

There are other issues, of course, but these get across the big ones. My suggestion is to use Flash as a tool, not as a crutch. Use it sparingly and use it correctly. It should not be the main focus of your site and you should provide as much information as possible in a web page or other text document as well. Avoid creating a flashy website - too much movement and animation is distracting, adds to download times and becomes very annoying very quickly.