In my opinion there is absolutely no good reason to display text-based information in Flash unless it’s part of a video or interactive feature, and many good reasons not to. I’ve seen lots of business websites coded entirely in Flash, and every time I see one, I feel like their Flash-happy designer has done them a huge disservice. Flash is great for for animation and video – that’s why it exists. But if you’re describing your services, providing contact information, or listing your products, Flash makes your site content far less accessible to search engine crawlers – both the ones compiling organic search results like Googlebot, and the ones checking your site quality and relevance for search advertising, like the Google AdWords AdsBot. An informational website for a business should really be coded in something crawler-friendly like HTML or PHP, with Flash animations used for compelling visual features like virtual tours, 3D product rendering, promotional videos, interactive demonstrations, stuff like that.

Since Google and other search engines have a hard time getting important information about your site if it’s in Flash, your site will suffer from the following side-effects:

(1) Search engines will have very little data about your website when they compile search results, so your site won’t appear even when someone searches for exactly your type of site with exactly your type of content. If it’s in Flash, it might as well not exist. (Yes, search engines claim they are getting better at crawling and indexing Flash content – but I’m not seeing much difference in their search results. And why make it harder for them when an easier alternative is available?)

Problem (2) is a related one. If you are trying to advertise your Flash-based site in Google AdWords, it will send its busy AdsBot crawler to take a look at it, pull out relevant data about your website, look for any serious problems (like too many affiliate links), and assign it a quality score. If it can’t get at vital information because it’s coded in Flash, do you think your quality score will be lower, or higher? (Hint: not higher.) And lower quality scores = low or no advertising clicks.

I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. In short, use Flash for what it’s designed for: animation, video, virtual tours and other cool interactive stuff, and stick with good old HTML for the important text-based information.