Outside of designing cool Third Rail products, I design and build websites full time at my firm for small to medium sized businesses. More often than not, they have some preconceived idea of what they want their site to do, and more often than not they are thinking something along the lines of a broadway spectacle, complete with music, animation and maybe even fireworks for a finale. Then they also want to be number one on Google when someone types in ‘enter_generic_keyword’. Oy.

We of course have to explain a little on how things work and that it’s not so easy, if even possible you can get your name on top or even first few pages for such a keyword. And if they should even be so concerned about being on top at all. For the ones who do want some SEO built into their site, along with a light marketing campaign the only answer as far as I am concerned is XHTML/JS/CSS aka DHTML.

I usually tend to discount Flash for most projects partly because of SEO problems, and partly because of any possible regular maintenance. I’ll use Flash if it fits the project, and if SEO isn’t a major requirement as is with many local businesses. With so much changing happening on the web in the last year or two, you can achieve Flash like websites without sacrificing indexable content. Just to a search for CSS Javascript gallery, you’ll find dozens of excellent solutions with beautiful fades, images sliding right to left and anything else they’ve thought up. Even menu’s can be animated like FLash, I’ve seen sliding tabs, OS X dock magnification, image loupes and so forth. So with the many, many tools available you can (with some spit and bubble gum of course) get your site loaded with many of the bells and whistles Flash has to offer.