Flash

I love visiting sites that are innovative and magical. Most of these sites use Flash in most, if not all, their magic.

Flash, if not done right, can create many problems for your visitors. Flash programs can be purchased separately for your website from vendors that specialize in Flash. The programming for your specific website can become fairly complicated, adding additional expense to your site.

All visitors may not be able to view your site as designed so back up code for visitors with older browsers or current browsers that don't read the code needs to be included, making this a job not to be recommended for a DIY job.

Another issue to keep in mind when adding Flash to your website is that Flash is not searchable by search engines. Special care should be taken with Search Engine Optimization so that your site gets the recognition it deserves.

Do Your Web Visitors See Your Spectacular Flash or Java?

One great metric that Google Analytics® coughs up for you is the browser capabilities that your visitors use. Let's assume that you have just rebuilt (or are planning to rebuild) your website. You've added a spectacular flash applet of your product. It looks great and would keep anyone coming back to view it over and over again.

You are monitoring your newly designed site and statistics point to a higher bounce rate than you expected. Further digging shows that the page with your incredible flash program is the page with the highest exit point.

So let's dig further and discover how many of your visitors can actually view your state of the art flash design.

The chart above shows that visitors to your site are slow to upgrade their versions of flash; with only 45% using the most current version. Further testing of your website using different flash versions may be in order.

This metric should also be used on an existing website that starts plummeting all of the sudden. Could it be the new version of flash has made your beautiful flash applet stop working?

Keeping an eye on your website metrics insures that visitors always experience your website the way you designed it to be experienced.