flash

a while ago gthing noticed that utah's latest pyramid scheme MLM opportunity, goyin, had an unintentionally comical—and not very search engine friendly—website.

well, it looks like they've outdone themselves. their website now sports no real text at all—not even in meta tags. and they top it all off with a really annoying flash based splash page.

somehow, in just over a thousand characters, they managed to earn zero SEO points, work in an Internet Explorer css hack, fail XHTML validation, make their site completely inaccessible to anyone with a screen reader, and annoy the crap out of me. great job, guys.

the complete landing page source code after the jump.

adobe (macromedia) flash is a very powerful tool which is, unfortunately, mostly used for evil.

flash is really good at embedding media, creating charts and graphs, making slideshows and games and all manner of great content.

it's a really, really, really, bad tool for your logo or website navigation or anything else that would be better done with html/css/javascript.

if you use flash to make a splash page for your site or build an entire website out of it, you should be kicked.

check out flash sucks: it's an interesting read.

I implore you: use it right, and only when absolutely, positively, unquestionably and undeniably necessary.

as an added bonus mike (the guy i quoted above) points out an html one-liner that brings internet explorer 6 to it's knees...