Complete Flash Site

I was quite surprised when I went to the River Island site today and found that they now have a site designed completely in Flash. Most sites that offer some sort of commercial product often go through a lot of trouble to make sure that they offer a static page so that it is searchable by the big search engines. Often people will first go to a search engine, a generic one like Google or Yahoo, or perhaps a more specialist one such as technorati or kelkoo. Even the traditional database based sites now are searchable as they realise how much commerce they can generate through consumers looking for a good deal.

Companies need to make sure that their cheapest products appear in these search engines as this is how they will attract new customers to their site. By limiting your site to a Flash based solution you not only deny people the ability to link to any product, you more importantly deny search engines access to spidering your site. There are many alternatives to getting a similar degree of design by using the latest AJAX technologies. Most of the stuff out there that uses Flash can be done using AJAX.

My main concern here is not actually with the company themselves. I mean they are a clothes/retail company, what do they know about web technology. The concern is with their IT consultants who have designed them the new site. What objective did they design the site to? Have a beautiful looking alternative to their previous site? Increase sales?

If the objective was to increase sales then why would a key component to this objective (attracting the new customers through search engines) not have featured in the debate. At least the minimum they could do is provide a HTML alternative to the site so that a search engine can at least pick that up.

Companies in my view will learn a lot as consumers start to move online more and more often. Many major corporations have moved on from the "its cool to have a website" to a more supplementary approach to allow people to go and look at products/news stories/interesting things in more detail online after getting exposure through the companies main channel. In the next 4-5 years I believe that companies will wake up to the sheer amount of commerce taking place online and you'll probably see even more powerful search engines than kelkoo coming out to meet consumer's needs. At the moment most shopping sites are inadequately designed and therefore the shopping search engines have a hard time getting fresh up to date data.