According to web usability consultant Jakob Nielsen, Flash websites are 99% Bad mmmkay. Two of the reasons he gives (in his now 7 year old report) for this claim are that:

• The “Back” button does not work.
• In general, Flash integrates poorly with search.

BLITZ has already addressed the first issue in our Flash Framework. The Framework implements an elegant and user-friendly solution that not only fixes the browser back button navigation issue, but also adds additional accessibility and usability functionality by adding support for:

• updating the browsers title bar with each unique page view
• deep-linking into sub-pages of a Flash website
• user bookmarking of sub-pages within a Flash website
• pretty URLs for all pages within a Flash website

With all of those problems solved, I decided to tackle the problem of how to optimize a Flash website for search engines. Since we are dealing with high end websites with large marketing budgets behind them, the end result had to be white hat compliant SEO. We couldn’t afford to get our clients websites blacklisted by the search engines. With search accounting for upwards of 40% of a websites total traffic volume (depending on the type of site) we needed to come up with a solution to offer to our clients that would give them more bang for their buck. The end result of our Flash SEO efforts looks a little something like this:

This application looks pretty simple on the surface, but the real power behind the tool lies underneath the covers.

Read full article here.

Brgds,

CP