Nothing gets me as hot, or is as common in the web development industry as companies giving clients erroneous advice. Programmers love to build neat stuff and designer love to design pretty stuff. The problem is that “neat” and “pretty” often times are in direct conflict with “profitable”. To be clear, I do not think this is done out of malice, but rather simple ignorance.

Nowhere is this more common than with the use of Flash technology. Every day I get website owners seeking me out because they are not seeing any sort of return on their website investment. The common story is that they went with a certain web developer because said developer had a fantastic looking portfolio of previous sites. And of course, that developer was heavily reliant upon using Flash technology. To be sure, Flash is indeed incredible looking. But herein lay the problems.

First and foremost, Google and other major search engines cannot properly index a page that is built in Flash. In fact, when the Google robots crawl a Flash website, the end result is the website is viewed from Google’s standpoint as being about nothing. The reason being is that Google’s robots only recognize HTML text and the more HTML text that is related to your specific topic matter, the better.

If you do not think this is a problem per say, then consider the following few facts.

• 85%-90% of all internet users rely on search engines to find information. (Georgia Tech /GVU Survey)
• The top 10 search engines make up more than 90% of all search traffic. (Georgia Institute of Technology).
• 75% of internet users never click past the first Search Engine Results Page (Georgia Institute of Technology).

This is not to mention that Flash pages are extremely slow to load and that some older browsers do not even support Flash.

So what is the moral of the story you ask? It is that most website developers focus exclusively on aesthetics and completely neglect one all important truth. The purpose of a web strategy is to drive sales for the business and websites that put form in front of function and fail to garner top ten rankings are losing an enormous number of their prospective buyers.

The most design conscious company on the planet, Apple, does not have a Flash website. What Apple does do, and what I advise all my clients to do, is use bits of Flash in conjunction with HTML. What I mean by this is using Flash buttons or a Flash banner as an accent to your text based HTML page. This strategy gives savvy website owners the best of both worlds.

William Foote is co-founder and a managing partner of the Internet Marketing and Web Development firm, VMG-interactive.