I think making flash menus for websites is the easiest way to make menus. Since google now supports searching flash files, are there any drawbacks to using flash in website menus? What I like about it is that I can make a flash menu once and use that for all pages, any changes I make will be reflected on all pages (easily...I know there are other ways to do this like using a seperate CSS page but flash menus are easiest for me for some reason), including if I make the flash menu longer, all pages will automatically resize, etc. etc. Are there easier ways....anyone have any other preferences? cg
Google problaby can crawle some flash but You can never be sure it will see everything. But If You have good sitemap then flash shouldn't be a problem.
I would stay away from using flash menu's for SEO purposes. It is still very dicy. Text based navigation works best for sites that I have produced that rank well. I do use a lot of flash on some of my clients sites and if I do have a main nav menu in flash I always make sure that I have a sub naviation on all pages that are text based. Do a search on using server side includes for items that are on pages. Trust me if you experiment with a few options you will find that there are better alternatives to creating a menu system that is simple to update using CSS.
Flash navigation is fine providing you have text links within your content that points to the rest of your content. The problem with flash - even now that Google announced it is indexing text content - is there's no clear indiciation they will follow the links to other content. To ensure all your content gets into the search engines, you must make it as easy as possible for them to get to it.
Actually google doesn't crawl dynamic flash files, so if you use xml driven flash files, you are out of the game
Just use flash menu's, but don't forget to but all the links from the flashmenu under the site in the footer. Of course visible. This makes it also user friendly because then your visitors don't have to scroll up again to see the menu. e.g. like this: Home | Downloads | Products | Other Solutions | About us | Contant Then you are sure that Google will still crawl the links
Although many people are saying Google will index Flash menuing, I will need to see this benchmarked. This is not a Design Issue. It is a question of how all the SEs will index the site. If this is your site, then it would be ok. But if it is a client's site, you will be harming them. CSS navigation is safer, works and can be indexed by all SEs. Many Flash designers have made great sites, and we are repeatedly hired to start the design over. This will not be good for your image. Flash - yes. Flash navigation - no.