How about “welcome to our website” headlines? Photos of jigsaw puzzles and handshakes?

No?

That’s weird, because according to the vast majority of small business websites out there, this stuff is the friggin cat’s pajamas. Why would anybody publish pages this way, if nobody likes it?

Because they failed, that’s why. And if you don’t want to fail too, here are ten things you probably shouldn’t do on your website.

1. Flash-driven design

Oooh – it moves!

I would have liked to think a few years ago that I wouldn’t be including this as the first item in such a list, but I guess some things improve a little slower than we’d like.

Let’s get this straight: Flash-driven design kills your search engine visibility. That means Google won’t love you. Google won’t even see you. Not even if you do your hair just right and wear your skinny jeans.

Not convinced? Jakob Nielsen, maybe the foremost usability expert in the world, says Flash is 99% bad. Think you’re home building website is in that good 1%? Lovely thought, but no. Not only are you shitting on Google’s head, but also the heads of your users. And that’s foul.

2. The Flash intro movie

This is the retarded cousin of the full-Flash website.

“Hey, what if we had our logo come in from somewhere off in the distance, really slowly…and then, once it’s fully visible, we’ll have the words, ‘integrity’, ‘innovation’ and ‘experience’ fly across…then we’ll-” STOP IT!

How long do you think you’ve got to grab you user’s attention? Hint: it isn’t 2 minutes. More like 10 seconds.

Most people won’t wait for your intro movie to play. They’ll either skip it or leave. So do your users, and yourself, a favor and ditch the idea.

3. “Welcome to our website”

This is another thing that should have gone the way of the pog but still seems to be clinging like crap on a yak.

People don’t like to read much online. They just don’t. So most of your copy? They’re going to scan it (if you’re lucky).

Why do you want to squander an already-tiny attention span on a headline with a central goal of reminding people where they are. You’re begging for a “no shit” response.

Unless your design is completely ass-backwards, people should have some idea of where they are just from glancing at the top of the site – where your logo and, ideally, a tagline or short description of your business should be.

4. We-speak

“We operate a fleet of vehicles…”

“Our team of experts is trained in…”

“We are certified to work on…”

Listen: nobody cares.

Your users are interested in the answer to one core question: what’s in it for me?

If your content doesn’t answer this question in short fashion, you fail. End of story.

5. Saying too little

OK, so we know people don’t particular enjoy reading website content.

But the idea isn’t to shut up entirely and communicate with hieroglyphics or vague statements like, “we create business solutions.”

Get direct about what you do, especially the value you provide, and tell the story of how you help your customers.

This isn’t a resume cover letter where you need to herald your achievements and qualities (nobody reads those either). This is your one chance to get through to a human being on the other end who may need, or want, what you can provide. Speak to them openly about what you’re offering, and give them the information they need (like social proof) to make their decision.

Give them a clear call to action, and then shut up.

6. Content that ignores search traffic

No, SEO is not the goal of content – but it’s a nice by-product if you do things right.

If you don’t do any keyword research before you start creating your content, you’re ignoring an opportunity to tap into the language your market uses to describe their problems (and the solutions they have in mind).

The language you use to describe what you do doesn’t matter when it comes to marketing. You’ve got to use the language your customers use.

When you do this right, the content on your pages matches the keywords your customers use to search. Then you’ve got a fighting chance to show up in the search results in front of people who need your stuff.

7. Overly-technical content

Similar to above, when you’re engrossed in technical work every day your language can start sounding like Klingon to the rest of us.

When you talk about your business the way your industry trade journals do, watch for the blank stare.

“We’re experienced in flux capacitor repair and carry top-of-the-line moisture evaporators…”

Does it really matter to you what’s technically involved in what your plumber does to make the poop go away like it’s supposed to?

You may love the technical side of your work, but if your language goes over your users’ heads you’ll lose them. They already will read only 20% of the copy on your page – do you want that 20% to be words they don’t understand?

8. No clear call to action

Once you’ve answered the question, “what’s in it for me” (see #4 above), your work moves to answering another question: “what do I do now?”

Nothing loses a user faster than the lack of a clear call to action.

And including your address and phone number somewhere in your footer does not qualify.

Big, beautiful and shiny buttons work best. The point is to make it obvious.

It isn’t that your users can’t figure it out by looking around. They’re smart people. The problem is, every one of us is a lazy bastard when it comes to web browsing. Make us work or think, and we get spiteful and leave. We could figure it out, but we won’t.

9. Zero inbound links or promotion

OK this one strikes a particular chord in me.

I help small businesses get more targeted web traffic (primarily through search engines). And many of the people who come to me have no idea that getting traffic can often be more work than building the website.

There is no such thing as a good “location” online. There’s no foot traffic. Nobody is going to happen upon your website – they have to be pointed to it.

If you take no steps to promote your website, and attract no links to it from other websites, you’ll flounder around in a tepid pool of nobody-loves-us.

Part of marketing online involves actually spreading the word (I know, novel concept). Having a nice looking website is a fine start, but if you want anybody to see the thing need a strategy for building links and attention.

10. Hiding your people

Who works for you?

Do they matter?

If you don’t think so, you’re probably a shitty boss. Hit yourself.

If they matter, why don’t you give them faces on your website?

One of the few advantages of being a small business is the close-knit, quirky personality that lends personality to your marketing (if you let it).

People want to hire other people they like. So let your people shine.

What kind of sad mistakes do you see small businesses making on their websites? Share in the comments.

In September of 2008 I walked out of an SEO job at a web marketing agency. I’d had enough.

The fact that this was also just when the U.S. economy was taking a big crap in its pants was just a fun coincidence. Here I was walking away from a paycheck when thousands of people a day were finding their own stripped away.

A lot of people asked me whether I had another job lined up. When I told them I didn’t they also crapped their pants.

What the hell was I thinking?

It’s been about 17 months – plenty of time to reflect on that decision, and the following decisions to turn down well-paying jobs at other agencies.

I still don’t know exactly what I’m doing.

But I have a better idea of why I’m doing it.

Dishonesty sucks

I don’t enjoy the knowledge that I’m burning up someone else’s time and money and calling it macaroni.

In my time in the agency world I saw a lot of work that should have never been sold. A SEO project would end up on my desk, and I’d find myself looking at the website in question and thinking, “they don’t need SEO. They need a message. They need a marketing overhaul. They might even need to be slapped around a bit first. SEO isn’t going to help them.” And don’t tell me a marketing overhaul is part of a complete SEO breakfast or I’ll hit you.

I still marvel at the ability of some salespeople to blow smoke up the asses of people who trust them, see the business hurt as a result and still drop by next year with a smile and a new Rolex.

Of course that’s an extreme image – most salespeople don’t own luxury watches, and if they don’t understand what they’re selling they might not know when it’s bogus. Thin excuse, if you ask me.

For me, doing unjustified, uninspired and frequently pointless work that was literally draining the pockets of business owners, who were entering the worst economy since the Great Depression, started to take a toll. My left eye developed a twitch. I had nightmares. I was angry constantly.

So I walked away. I had a few freelance clients (the agency I worked for was nice enough to let me work on the side). I had a trickle of income and some money in the bank. I could survive until I built momentum.

Today there’s not much in the bank. Some. Enough that I’m not worried about my bills. Not enough to buy a Rolex. And I’m still not sure when that momentum thing kicks in.

But aside from when something big goes wrong with a project or a client doesn’t pay (both rare) I sleep pretty well these days.

Knowing your own ethics

Years ago I was talking with a salesman I worked with who’d been out shaking the trees for new SEO clients. We were discussing a project he wanted to pitch. It turned into an argument.

I didn’t think SEO was the answer. I thought the client’s problems were much bigger, and that presenting them with SEO as a “solution” was a mistake (and dishonest).

He wanted to bring in business. And the conversation stopped abruptly when he said this:

“The important thing is that we’re working.”

There was nowhere to go from there. His ethic was wrapped up in that sentence, and I knew it didn’t click with mine.

What I wanted to say is, “no, the important thing is that we’re helping our clients.” But I don’t think it would have made a difference.

But ethical debates are somewhat pointless in commerce. Markets decide. Nobody likes to be swindled, but that’s nothing new. “It’s bad to cheat people” isn’t exactly a profound statement.

And the time and effort you can spend pointing out the dishonesties of others, dragging the ugly little man out from behind the curtain, is usually better spent in other endeavors.

It ain’t all bad

There are good people in this industry. And by “good” I don’t just mean upstanding citizens; they’re good at what they do. They generate a positive return for their clients. They pull their weight and then some.

But if we’re taking Internet marketing as a whole we have to accept that there’s no barrier to entry – anybody with a laptop and wi-fi access can hang their shingle online. They can solicit clients, publish any content and push any product they want. They can lie and screw people over (whether they’re aware they’re doing it or not).

On a long enough timeline the dishonest will find themselves spending money and time turned backward scrubbing their muddy footprints. But there will be dishonest companies as long as there are dishonest people.

At some point each of us has to answer this question: what are you willing to do for money?

It was sloppy, bloated and choked search engine crawlers like a boney chicken sandwich.

Then I learned the right way to use CSS. I learned it from Andy Budd, Simon Collison and Cameron Moll in a phenomenal book called CSS Mastery that should be on every front-end developer’s bookshelf.

That’s my copy looking well-worn from years of use.

Here’s the thing: search engines love clean code. When you give it to them your websites tend to rank better.

But if you learned how to build websites with tables and <font> tags chances are your code isn’t clean. Your pages are probably overloaded with extraneous crap that search crawlers don’t need or want.

Using CSS properly gets all of your presentational code out of the way so search crawlers can focus on what they want: your content. It’s also from an SEO standpoint in various other ways.

Here are seven ways you can use CSS to improve your search rankings.

1. Clean up your code

When code gets bloated the signal to noise ratio gets out of control. The result is code that search crawlers can’t make sense of (not to mention developers trying to get maintenance/updates done).

The beauty of CSS summed up: it keeps your styles separate from your content.

From an SEO standpoint this is great – search crawlers get straight to the content with none of the code that sets colors/fonts/sizes getting in the way. And your design can stay glorious. Everyone’s happy.

2. CSS-driven drop-down menus

Drop-down menus are nifty and add a level of usability to your website – especially when your site architecture requires multiple levels of links.

But building them from scratch sucks. So most of us grab scripts from around the web and frankenstein them into our designs to speed up development.

The problem: many of these scripts use JavaScript to construct the link lists.

There’s nothing wrong with JavaScript. It powers much of web as we know it today. But when you hide your link code inside JavaScript search engines don’t see it.

CSS-driven drop-down menus are search-friendly, because they use CSS (with some slight JavaScript) to appear/disappear. When a search crawler hits your page all of the links are visible in the source code. This promotes a “flat” site architecture – or one where most of your pages, even the deep ones, are linked from the home page – helping spread the link juice to them.

Here are some SEO-friendly CSS drop-down scripts to consider using for your next project:

• Son of Suckerfish Dropdowns from HTML Dog
• CSS Express Drop-Down Menus from Project VII
• Chrome CSS Drop Down Menu from DynamicDrive

3. Hidden/expandable DIVs

Sometimes a design calls for having a portion of the page “expand” to reveal more text or other content when a user rolls over with their mouse or clicks a link/button.

Sometimes these hidden areas are driven by JavaScript – again, this delivers the desired functionality, but from a search crawler standpoint the content is invisible.

Using CSS you can create a hidden <div> (which is a generic container), set it to be “invisible” and trigger it to appear when a user mouses over or otherwise activates it – and you can do it in a way that keeps all of the code visible to search engines.

There’s a great example of this at RandomSnippets.com (complete with the code that drives the action).

4. Use images for headings without sacrificing the text

Often times your design guidelines require you to use a certain font for your headings and other elements. But only a handful of fonts are “web safe” – meaning they’re standard to most operating systems and browsers so your users will see them.

The normal approach to this problem is to use an image instead of text to achieve the look you’re going for.

The problem: search engines can’t read words in images.

CSS provides a pretty painless solution – use image replacement to hack the text back into your heading.In other words, you get to keep your heading image AND your text (so search engines can read it).

Here are two methods to do this that are simple and quick:

• Phark
• Gilder/Levin method

5. Use images for links without sacrificing the text

Sometimes you can’t get that top navigation bar looking just right without using images for the buttons. But anchor text is important.

You could use ALT text to indicate the text in the images – and this will give the search engines a hint. But if you’re using background images with CSS for your links you won’t have this option.

Setting the “title=” attribute in your links will also give some indication – but it pales in comparison to including actual anchor text.

With CSS you can use images for your links while still including anchor text in the code.

One easy way: set your “text-indent” property to -9999px;. This essentially pushes the text off the page, leaving the image viewable. This is the same method as the Phark method listed above.

Note: don’t get funny with this and try stuffing keywords into your links since they won’t be viewable. If you get a manual review from someone on a search engine’s spam team your site will be smacked.

6. Speed up load times

Load times are a concern for search engines. Crawlers will only spend so much time parsing your pages (depending on how important they think the pages are). That means if you have pages that contain a lot of content and features chances are search crawlers won’t bother with the whole thing.

Not to mention the usability issues you create with slow page loads.

Another thing to keep in mind: Google Webmaster Tools shows you how much time Googlebot spends downloading pages at your website. Think about it: why would Google store this information if page load time was not a concern for their crawler? Do you think Google wants to send their users to pages that take 5-6 seconds to load?

Using CSS properly can chop page load times significantly. It frees your site of <font> tags, <table> tags and many of the other extraneous code that drags down your site performance.

7. Control code order

With most CSS-driven designs you can actually change the order of elements in your source code without effecting the design. This is because the presentation (the position, size, layout, color, etc) of elements is entirely separate from the code.

Why is this useful for SEO?

There’s a little issue with the way Google crawls links on to your internal pages. They only count the first anchor text they find.

That means if you link to your Services page with the text “Services” in your main navigation, but then link with anchor text “Widget Repair Services” somewhere in the body of your home page only the first anchor text will count.

So tweaking your footer links and body links won’t help if the same pages are linked to in your header.

CSS gives you a unique opportunity: to visually place an element independent of its position in the source code.

For example: if your left navigation column occurs first in the source code, followed by your body, or right, column, you can’t use internal links in the body to optimize those lower-level pages (because they’re already linked to in the navigation). With CSS you can swap the columns in the source code without effecting the visual design. So when Googlebot comes along it’ll first scan the links in your body copy, count the anchor text there and ignore the anchor text it sees later when it scans down to your navigation.

These are just a few of the ways working with CSS can improve SEO. If anyone knows of some other CSS tricks that help with SEO please feel free to drop them into the comments.

Most small and mid-sized businesses use Google Analytics – it’s user-friendly, powerful and, best of all, free.

An “out-of-the-box” installation of Google Analytics gives you a lot of great data when it comes to analyzing your organic search traffic. However, there’s a lot more to dig into – and the value can be tremendous.

In my experience most Google Analytics users and installations barely scratch the surface of what the platform can do.

Here are 10 ways to pimp your Google Analytics installation and get the most out of your SEO data:

1) Pull ranking data directly into your GA reports.

André Scholten posted at Joost de Valk’s blog earlier this year explaining how, using Custom Filters, you can pull ranking data directly into your Google Analytics profile.

As of now granularity is limited to the results page – so you can’t tell precisely where you’re ranking (just on which page). However, Andre recently posted again on the topic explaining that Google is testing a new AJAX version of their search engine. I’m not seeing this in my results as of now (I’m in NY, USA), but if you see a hashtag (#) in your results you are likely on the AJAX version – which allows you to set a new custom filter and track ranking down to the position.

Even with only page ranking data it’s helpful to have this information right in Google Analytics (it shows up in the Visitors > User Defined section).

Alternatively you can drop your keywords into a tool like SEOBook’s Rank Checker, which will check your ranking position (and the URL of the ranked page) for multiple keywords.

Note: if you’re going to set up a Custom Filter as above you’ll want to create a new Profile for your website first. Why? If something goes wrong and you end up filtering too much data it’s gone for good.

2) Filter your branded terms

Not that branded or navigational terms are a bad sign – in fact, they tell you a lot about how your off-site marketing is working. And some returning users navigate by dropping your URL into a search box (a bit backwards, but hey, it takes all kinds).

But non-branded terms are often where the real opportunity lies in growing your business through increasing search traffic.

When you’re viewing a keyword report you can filter out branded terms by using the “Filter Keyword” box at the bottom of the report. To filter multiple keywords separate terms with a pipette |, as below:

The “Filter Keyword” box is also great for focusing on a group of keywords based on a root keyword. For example, if the website you’re working with offers accounting services, you can select “Containing” from the drop-down menu and enter “Audit” to include only keywords containing that root word. This is great when you’re separating keywords into branches during your research.

3) Compare date ranges

The best way to growth trends in your search traffic is to compare time periods.

Google Analytics includes a handy feature that allows you to compare date ranges. Just click on the date range at the top right of your report, check the “Compare to Past” box and provide your comparison date ranges :

This is very useful for demonstrating growth over time:

Even down to the individual keyword level:

4) Visualize the “long tail”

It can be tough to explain the benefits of the long tail of search traffic. SEO consultants are used to clients focusing on those few broad keywords they want to rank for. However, any SEO worth her salt knows that the real value of search traffic is found in the long tail – those hundreds and thousands of keyword variations that, while they don’t each bring in a ton of traffic, combined make up the lion’s share of traffic and revenue.

Navigate to Traffic Sources > Keywords and click on the pie chart button to demonstrate visually the percentage of traffic (or revenue) that comes in through the long tail of search. You’ll almost always get a Pac Man shape – the biggest portion made up of keywords other than those top 10.

5) Set conversion points (“Goals”)

Google Analytics allows you to set a page URL as a “Goal” – which, once it’s set up and tracking properly, offers some crucial information. To set this up view the settings for your profile:

You can specify the steps that lead to your goal (great for checkout steps on eCommerce websites) which provides a nifty Funnel Visualization (great for identifying exit points in your checkout process):

Goals are also tracked against other metrics – providing some great actionable data even down to the keyword level:

The ability to track conversion rates per keyword is powerful. You can use this data to determine your most valuable keywords – then re-target your pages for the best terms.

Note: you can only add four Goals per profile (but you can create multiple profiles for your website).

6) Track visitor value

If you’re running an eCommerce site hopefully you’re tracking revenues with Google Analytics eCommerce tracking code. If you aren’t I’d set that up lickity split. The information is crucial if you’re looking to chop the dead wood out of your campaign over time (and shouldn’t you be?):

Even when your site isn’t a pure eCommerce website (such as a lead-generation website) it’s important to calculate the average value of a goal. Obviously you’re not going to end up with accurate-enough data for your accountant, but setting a goal value allows you to measure against advertising costs (such as pay-per-click campaigns).

To set up a goal value navigate to your profile settings and click to either add or edit a goal.

7) Mine keyword data for your PPC campaigns

Both numbers #5 and 6 above provide you with great per-keyword information in the way of identifying your truly valuable search traffic (and where it’s coming from).

This information is also a great place to start when you’re looking to launch a new pay-per-click campaign. Some of the guess work is already removed from the equation. When you can’t improve your organic rankings for keywords that tend to convert well and bring in revenue (or, at least, organic rankings are a long-term goal) you can make a well-educated guess as to how profitable these keywords will be in PPC.

For example, the circled keyword in the screenshot below is likely a good target for PPC traffic. Of course you’ll want to check the traffic potential, costs-per-click, etc, all against your profit margin, but with the conversion data already in play you’re way ahead of the game.

8) Use Advanced Segments to focus on search traffic

Normally when you browse to a section in Google Analytics, such as “Content,” you’re looking at traffic per page overall. The “Top Landing Pages” option, for example, will show you what pages had the most Entrances (or what pages were the first pages visitors landed at) along with Bounce Rate and other data. However, only a portion of this traffic comes from search engines. You have to drill into each page and then to “source keywords” to find out what keywords people used to find those pages.

Advanced Segments allows you to focus in on a specific traffic source or other dimension or metric. So you can, for example, view the Top Landing Pages report only for search-referred traffic.

You can also compare one segment against another. For example, the screenshot below demonstrates comparing Non-paid Search Traffic with Referral Traffic – you can view this comparison data across most reports.

To create your own Advanced Segment for inclusion in your reports look for the “Advanced Segments” link on the lower-left of your profile view:

Once inside the Advanced Segments interface, click the “Create new custom segment” link at the top right:

Then you need to pick what metric(s) and dimension(s) to filter your segment by. The possibilities are vast.

9) Combine ranking and traffic reports, sort accordingly

Here’s one of my favorite ways to find new content and ranking opportunities, step-by-step:

1. In Google Analytics, navigate to Traffic Sources > Search Engines > Google and select “non-paid” to avoid including any AdWords data.
2. Filter your branded keywords (see #2 above)
3. Change the “Show rows” drop-down from “10″ to “100″ – this will display your top 100 traffic-referring non-branded keywords from Google.
4. Choose “Export” at the top of the report screen, and select “CSV for Excel”
5. Pull up the spreadsheet in Excel
6. Remove extra formatting / rows
7. Select all 100 keywords
8. Drop them into SEOBook Rank Checker
9. When Rank Checker completes its report, export that to CSV, open in Excel and copy/paste the Google.com URL and Google.com Position rows into your Google Analytics spreadsheet
10. Sort by ranking (ascending) and then by traffic (descending)

What you end up with is a list of traffic-referring keywords sorted by ranking and then traffic.

The aim: find some keywords you’re only ranking on page two for (or thereabouts) but that still seem to refer traffic – then either A) create new content targeting these keywords or B) re-optimize your already-ranking pages for these keywords.

10) Track non-page-load actions (like RSS subscriptions)

One issue with the way Google Analytics tracks conversions is that it requires a page load event. That means Goals have to involve the visitor landing at a specific URL on your site (such as a “Thank You” page once they’ve completed a form or purchased something).

However, using the pageTracker._trackPageview() function you can make track just about anything as a page load.

For example, I’m tracking the “Subscribe” link at the top of the left column as a Goal. Every time a user clicks to subscribe to our RSS feed it’s recorded – and we can view this data in any of our reports to see where we tend to get the most RSS subscribers.

Here’s what this looks like in our source code:

For more information on using the pageTracker._trackPageview() function I recommend viewing the “Event Tracking and Virtual Pageviews” presentation at Google’s Conversion University.

More Resources

There’s a lot to get into with Google Analytics. Far too much to cover in a single blog post, and far more than I’d ever have the insight and ability to discuss effectively.

If you’re inclined to learn more about Google Analytics and Web Analytics in general I’d recommend the following resources:

• Conversion University – Google’s “IQ Lessons” for Google Analytics, intended for those who wish to test for Google Analytics Individual Qualification. I received my qualification earlier this year (I was #264 to do it). Conversion University offers a lot of great information, and the multimedia presentations make it easy to digest.
• Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik – Avinash is Google’s Analytics Evangelist and a brilliant blogger on the topic. This is a must-read blog for anyone interested in analytics. He frequently uses Google Analytics for his walkthroughs and examples. He also wrote Web Analytics: An Hour a Day and just finished writing his second book, Web Analytics 2.0, which isn’t out yet but is sure to be widely-read. This page on Occam’s Razor lists various Videos and Podcasts on Web Analytics and is worth bookmarking.
• ROI Revolution Blog – ROI Revolution is a North Carolina agency that specializes in Google AdWords, Analytics, Website Optimizer and Urchin – in short, they know Google’s platforms inside and out. Their blog reflects this, offering many useful insights into Google Analytics and related topics.
• Analytics Talk – Justin Cutroni blogs on various analytics issues, often focusing on Google Analytics in particular. A great blog worth reading and subscribing to.

The problems Flash creates for SEO are well-documented. I covered the topic in April.

Less-often discussed are the numerous reasons, other than SEO, that building a website with Flash is the lame sauce.

1) It takes longer (increasing costs)

It takes a developer more time to build a Flash page than an HTML page. Period.

Add fancy animations and interactive elements and development time skyrockets.

When you’re paying a developer, time = money. That doesn’t mean you cut corners to save time and lower your overall costs, but consider whether that intro movie is really adding value to your user’s experience. Chances are it isn’t.

2) Maintenance is more involved and costly

How often do you change something on your website?

Once a month? Once a week?

With a Flash-driven site adding pages or tweaking content isn’t straightforward. The developer often needs to go back to the original website file, navigate to the right section, make the change you’ve requested, re-export the website file and upload it to the server. They might have to tweak the ActionScript code (Flash’s programming language).

Compare this to making a change on a WordPress site, where you yourself can log in and make the change instantaneously – no coding or uploading required.

Depending on what you’re paying your developer for edits the costs here can really add up. If you plan to have your website updated regularly you’ll probably want to stay away from Flash.

3) Flashy doesn’t mean usable

You ever sit down with a salesman who’s on autopilot?

You walk into the room and he’s off and running, tearing through a script he’s practiced hundreds of times. Waving his arms. Pointing his fingers. Smiling widely. Not a care in the world for what you’re saying.

Flash websites are like that salesman.

You land at them, they start spinning around, dancing, lights are going off, music is playing – meanwhile you’re just looking for a phone number.

And forget about bookmarking pages or avoiding the song and dance the next time you return. Most Flash websites live on a single URL (the home page) and run through the same introduction every time the page is refreshed.

Flash websites are usually too busy showing off their tricks to actually serve users’ needs.

4) You lose the ability to track user behavior

If I had to pick the most important advantage of online marketing over traditional offline methods, I’d pick trackability.

The ability to track where your visitors came from and what they did when they arrived is so crucial. It allows you to optimize your online marketing spend, focusing on the traffic that pays the bills and chopping out the dead wood.

Most analytics platforms (including Google Analytics, which we use for UnstuckDigital.com) track behavior based on page views. In other words, every time a page loads, information about the last page, the time so far spent on the website, the referral source (how the user found your site), etc is all recorded (or re-recorded).

The problem? Most Flash websites load on a single URL. The home page. That’s it. So when a visitor hits your site and starts viewing pages, the most you’re going to track is where they came from and how long they spent. That’s it. Not enough information if you’re looking to improve your online marketing ROI in the future.

5) It’s a dog when it comes to load times

Flash is pretty intense when it comes to file sizes.

When you arrive at a Flash-driven website, ever notice the loading bar that takes 1-2 minutes to fill up?

It’s there because the website is loading every single page ahead of time. That’s how most Flash websites work – the entire website file has to be downloaded to your computer before you can see even a single page.

When your users are in a hurry (and online everyone is in a hurry 24 hours a day) your “loading…” sign may as well read, “piss off!” It says, “if you were looking for speedy browsing you came to the wrong place.”

6) Design updates are a nightmare

Outside of the general maintenance tasks (adding pages, fixing spelling, updating “news,” etc) a time will inevitably arrive when you want to update the look and feel of your website.

Guess what? Flash doesn’t make that easy either.

In fact, most Flash websites are better off developed from scratch when a major design update is called for. Can you say $$$$? (Me neither that’s not a word)

Now consider the proper use of HTML and CSS. A thing of beauty. Content and presentation totally separate. Not convinced? Head over to CSS Zen Garden and take a look. Every design variation there uses the same exact source code. Read that again. Same source code. The only changes are the image and CSS files.

7) Disabled users are banished

Ever hear of the concept of web accessibility?

It basically refers to building your website in a way that allows impaired users to have the best experience possible.

Users without strong-enough eyesight often browse using devices called screen readers that, you guessed it, read the words on the screen to them so they can read and navigate your website.

And Flash doesn’t play nice with these assistive devices.

Combine this with the fact that browsers can’t enlarge the type on a Flash website, and you’re talking about a web that is exclusive only to those with good vision.

There have been some efforts to require by law that websites are built accessibly. While that may be a long time coming to fruition the incentive of improving the experience of impaired visitors should be reason enough.

8) Browser navigation doesn’t work

Just a quick point on this.

You know the “back” button we rely on so frequently?

On your single-URL Flash website it’s useless it helps people leave and never come back. Since they’ll always technically be on your home page a quick click “back” sends them to wherever they came from. And my guess is that they won’t be in a hurry to return. Just a hunch.

9) Mobile users are up the creek

The mobile web is here.

The most heavily-used mobile web browser is the iPhone. That doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon. Something to the order of 25 million iPhones have been purchased so far. The BlackBerry is still popular as well.

And neither of these mobile devices support Flash.

Even when the iPhone gets Flash support (any day now, Apple!) without a wireless internet connection download speeds are slight at best. Your 2mb Flash website file is going to be overkill for a casual mobile visitor. Think they’re going to wait 15 minutes just to view your home page? Not bloody likely.

10) No semantic markup

Not sure semantic markup matters?

Three letters. S.E.O.

I know I said I wouldn’t mention it, but come on now. SEO is crucial.

Semantic markup is about reinforcing the meaning or topic of a page. Critical for SEO.

Flash files don’t contain semantic markup. Sure, Googlebot can crawl Flash (sort of) – but that doesn’t mean Googlebot can assume semantic relationships between page elements. In other words, it’s going to get a garbled bunch of content and little/no indication of what’s what. Not the best situation when your page is up against a few million others in a relevance contest.

A closing note to Flash developers: I am fully aware that there are (expensive) work-arounds to most of these issues. I started my web development career building in Flash. I love Flash as much as you guys. But let’s be realistic: the vast majority of Flash-driven websites do not offer solutions for the issues in this post. Most of them suck for the above reasons and more.

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