Most everyone has seen some pretty flashy websites in their day. They fly around the page, usually have all sorts of nifty animations when switching between pages, and generally look pretty impressive. Some of our favorites include 2Advanced and Web Agent 007. While sites like that are incredibly impressive, their main drawback (in our eyes) was that they were effectively invisible to search engines, an enormous drawback that really limited their appeal to companies who understood that while eye candy is great, the main thing that a website needs to do is rank highly.

Search Engines like Google and Yahoo are effectively blind. The only thing they can see is text like in this blog post. Now web technology has advanced to provide us a solution that has long been overdue. “Searchable” Flash Web Sites, powered by a full content management system like this blog. It’s called fCMS and really will open a new chapter in web site design. With the confluence of incredible animation and the ability to search everything in the site means that we’re going to see some pretty impressive sites in the coming years using tools such as these.

This is simply the beginning. The bright lads at Google have long known that while a lot of the information people are looking for online is text-heavy, the majority (in terms of file size) is in images, video, PDF’s, Flash, and downloadable files. Google and the other search engines are rapidly making progress in these areas. The one people are most familiar with is with PDF’s. If you do a search on Google for IRS Form 1099 the first result isn’t the proper IRS website, but the PDF form. As the years go on, we can expect more and more of the content that was previously available only by manually search on multiple sites. This will allow future websites to be increasingly content-rich and be rewarded appropriately with good rankings by Google.

The future is indeed bright for flashy, fun web sites.