In the quest to find methods to help improve marketing results for wedding professionals I often look at website options/techniques. Previously I have discussed the impressive advantages of using a rich featured blog engine as the basis for your entire website, but ignored the almost crippling impact Flash based websites can have on your Internet marketing.

Even today one of the most frequent website questions is “Flash or HTML?” The best answer lies in how you respond to this one simple question: Do you want your website to market your business (be a marketing partner), OR do you want the additional necessity of having to market your website?

I thought we had gotten past the time when people were fascinated with the wow factor of having a Flash Site and had woken up to the reality and amazing return on investment of internet marketing. Flash can be very pretty but if you want to get traffic to a Flash site you are going to have to advertise your site instead of your site advertising you. But a well crafted HTML site can leverage Google, and other search engines, to market for you. Without website traffic there are no sales.

This quote from SEO evangelist Tim Nash’s blog sums it up pretty clearly, “Adobe Flash (formally Macromedia) is a great tool for developing highly artistic multimedia applications;but  it has the accessibility and searchability of a brick. If you are serious about getting organic rankings the only advice is stay away from Flash, I mean it. Stop reading this post it will not help!”

Even though the large search engines like Google have some Flash indexing capabilities these are still very limited. The internet is and always has been a text based environment. That is just how search works. When the search spiders crawl your site they are looking for words and relevant content; to do that they have to be able to read the words. The text on a Flash based site is read as an image, not readable words. Since the spider doesn’t see any relevant content it just crawls off to another site and doesn’t bother to index your cool pretty Flash site. No indexing, no ranking in the search engines. What more, is they often see an entire Flash site as a single image. That means that even if you have 1000 images in your gallery of the most amazing whatever the search engines still see it as a single image.

I don’t care how your site looks, if no one finds it what are you getting for your marketing dollars? So the question remains do you want to spend your marketing dollars getting clients to your business or to your website? Traffic to your site shows off your work and your business and prompts clients to contact and hopefully hire you. The more good traffic you have the better chance you have of selling more. If your site, amazing though it may be, doesn’t show up high in the rankings of the major search engine you are going to have to drive people to your site through other marketing channels. That means increased print media buys and increased exposure at bridal shows to advertise your website just to get people to find it. Expect to spend well over a dollar a click through. It is not unusual for wedding photographers to spend $2.00 to $6.00 per click through. So here you have spent all this money on what your designer told you was a pretty website and you are now having to spend bucks just to get people to view it. Organic search is free, take advantage of the best marketing deal ever, organic search results. All you need to do is replace your Flash website.