Flash, HTML and Wordpress based websites compared

Flash, HTML and WordPress based websites compared

June 16, 2010

Should your new website be in Flash, HTML or WordPress?

These are the basic choices for creating a new website. None are really “better” than another, but each has their purpose. If you start with the end goal of best serving your visitors, then you’ll be able to select the best web technology for your website.

Flash websites: Fantastic Multimedia Presentations

Flash websites can be amazing. Flash allows you a great level of interactivity, video, animation, and multimedia that you cannot get out of standard HTML by a long shot. Multimedia is Flash’s strength.

The types of websites Flash works well for are:

Educational demonstrations
Product Demos
Artist and musician websites that must have an artistic feeling

Flash is not good at:

Content rich websites
Websites that want a good search engine ranking
Updating content easily

The main problem with Flash is not the technology, but how it is used. A website that is completely Flash is hard to navigate, hard to change, hard to make search engine friendly, slow on loading. Flash is best done when implemented inside of an HTML based website as a banner or component of the website. That way the whole website loads, can be changed and made search engine friendly and you still get the Flash multimedia benefits. Also, its a lot more expensive to build.

I would argue that almost no website should be an entirely Flash website. The drawbacks are just too many with no benefits that could not be achieved by embedding the Flash as a component within the website.

Beware: many web designers are Flash-happy. If you’re not careful, you’ll drop several thousand on a website that will give you only headaches.

For more reading, here’s an interesting article on Flash vs HTML, an article on Flash and the iPad, and an article on Flash and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

HTML Websites: Your First Investment on the Web

For many website owners, an HTML website is their first website. An HTML only website is built using the basic coding languages of the web, namely HTML, CSS and JavaScript. These sites, if correctly built, are fast to load, flexible in design, easy to make search engine friendly. If built incorrectly, they have none of those benefits. In either case, HTML only websites are difficult to update as you have to weed through HTML code.

But even a poorly built HTML website gets you up on the web and familiar with the web. And hopefully, you didn’t spend too much on it.

The downsides to an HTML site are constrained to flexibility to update and build on the content you already have. A great website is always growing, always updating and changing. Updating your website weekly is cost and time prohibitive.

WordPress Websites: the best of all web worlds

WordPress (or any other Content Management based website) offer the best of all worlds. They are quick to load (though not as fast as straight HTML), they are very flexible to update and change, they are inexpensive to develop, they are very easy to optimize for search engines. Also, you can embed Flash components through out the website.

Using one of the thousands of freely available themes, you can have a nice, clean, professional design for very low cost. If you want your own design, its a little more work to convert it to a WordPress Theme, but its certainly not cost prohibitive like changes to Flash websites are. You can embed forms and photo galleries quite easily.

If you are considering a new website or upgrading your existing one, I highly recommend giving a WordPress based website consideration. There is so much you can get out of it, the cost is not bad at all, and you’ll have all the flexibility of being able to update the site.

Here’s our entry level package that shows some screen shots of the website administration.

I started off by saying none of the technologies are better than another. That’s true, but know what technology goes where. Almost no site should be all Flash. And if you’re starting from scratch, you’re better off with a WordPress site than a straight HTML.