Recently I’ve been looking at the websites of a loft developments around Toronto. Without exception the sites suck in far too many ways. I’m going to pick on www.westsidelofts.ca, but it is by no means alone in its sins.

I’m not going to just complain, I’m going to provide some constructive criticism.

Here are points number 1, 2, and 3 on my list of how to not break your website don’t use Flash . Now I’m going to backpedal a little, and say that there are times when Flash can be a useful tool. However, creating a simple image and text based website is not one of those times, that’s what HTML is for.

OK, so that’s my ugly anti-Flash zealotry laid out. But why, what’s my problem? Well here one important problem:

Google hates Flash as much as I do - you simply can’t afford to have your site ignored by Google, but by using Flash that’s exactly what you’re going to get. Long story short, the text in a Flash based site is not readable by computers, so Google has no way of telling what your site is about, which means you don’t exist.

Here’s an example if you search for “west side lofts” on Google you should see www.westsidelofts.ca at number one, so far so good, and that’s because the URL contains exactly those search terms, so Google assumes the site must be relevant. But now try searching for lofts toronto, lofts toronto queen street or even west side lofts toronto and you won’t see the site come anywhere in the first several hundred results. That’s because they used flash to create the site so Google can’t read it to determine that it should be a top result for all those searches.

Now it would be possible to build a Flash site that didn’t have these problems to such an extent. But why bother, it makes much more sense to build the site in HTML, which could be equal or easily beat a Flash site in usability, attractiveness, findability and probably costs less to boot.