Principles of web design apply to flash design. This is a big part of web design, however there is a set of up-to-date principles specific to flash that I wanted to outline in this post.

1. Google in June of 2008 announced that they are able to crawl inside Adobe Flash Files. However this is still not as good for SEO efforts as straight HTML. Here’s an excerpt from Google and their web design and flash design experts.

“…All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.”

2. Since Google can not crawl and index flash files as well as HTML, we should still mix HTML into our flash and web designs.

3. Flash design can utilize SWFSddress to provide deep linking in your flash files and change the URL as your visitors maneuver through your flash site.

4. We should always use SWFObject to display the HTML content backup if the visitor does not have the flash player plugin (98% of all internet users do). This will also work very well with SEO efforts, having an HTML backup of your web design.

5. Pay attention to devices and what they are capable to display. the iPhone and iPod Touch still cannot display flash content.