I’m always amazed that large corporations or organizations insist on using flash based websites.  Earlier this week I attended CIMA (Chicago Interactive Marketing Association) and I had a discussion with an employee of a web design and interactive marketing company.  He claimed that flash sites can easily be SEO’d and are no different from blogs - how wrong he was.  Below is an example of a highly effective flash website for Mel Brook’s new Broadway Musical, “Young Frankenstein.”

The above page has strong call to actions: Buy Tickets, Enter Site, Buy Group Tickets.  Also notice the fusion marketing by Fidelity investments.

The above page had video embedded into the site, however, the video looked skewed and was hard to watch.  Still, this is a beautiful site that is very effective, but probably hampers ticket purchases because it is very slow to navigate.  Additionally, I dont recall seeing an html version.

So why use flash sites?  I think because companies that design these types of sites want to impress their clients and they are expensive to make (good for the design firm).  Search engines have a hard time scraping flash sites and effectively indexing their contents.  I always recommend to my clients that want flash based sites to incorporate a blog - and to update that blog with fresh content daily.  Whenever I can, I always try and just push for the blog, as I know from experience it has a much higher ROI than flash based sites.