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Good news to Flash-crazy Webmasters:  Google now indexes Web content found inside Adobe Flash® files! Until recently, search engines’ crawlers were not able to "see" Flash content — text inside Flash movies, Flash menu links, etc. Ergo, Web sites built with Flash did very poorly in search engine rankings. Well, that’s about to change now.

Ever since Macromedia rolled out their awesome vector-based animation platform, Flash has provided the Web designer with a way to wow their clients. Web sites that contained Flash movies became some of the best-looking online presences. But the problem was, Web sites built entirely with Flash — no matter how beautifully-crafted it was — were not searchable. For a huge number of Internet users, if a site is not indexed by Google or Yahoo!, it doesn’t exist.

So, for Web developers, it has always been a balancing act between content and design. But this might soon change.

With the improvements to its core technology introduced by Adobe, Flash content is now visible to search engines. Web site owners can now expect to see their Flash sites appearing on SERPs. This is probably one of the best news I’ve heard coming out this year (to you, too, if you were a Web developer).

So far, only Google has implemented SWF searchability. Yahoo!, on the other hand, seems to be saying that they still have to work out some kinks before they can index Flash content… Here’s the FAQ from Adobe.

The question is:  When will Adobe implement search-engine friendly URLs for Flash content?

Search engine indexing is one thing, but that’s not all of it. For a Flash-heavy Web site to be properly ranked by Google, for instance, incoming links to deeper content will have to be made possible. Let’s say I have a site created and deployed entirely in Flash. Let’s assume that the site has sections and sub-sections, and sub-sections contained articles. What if one of my avid readers wanted to link directly to a particular article?

Linking to the top-level address is all well and good, but deeper links are also valuable to enhancing a site’s search engine ranking. So, I hope Adobe is working on this as well.

Christopher Cubos and I, ever since we got acquainted in the mid-90s, have been known to be at loggerheads when it comes to certain industry issues. For example, way back in the early days of Philippine Internet (Web 0.5?), we had a long-running argument about content vs. design.

However, we are in wholehearted agreement on one thing: community-building. On this score, we are completely on the same side. (Actually, we agree on two things: the other one is good food.) (more…)

After the lecture and discussions about Adobe Acrobat and Flex theres a small raffle and give-aways by Ted Padova.

Heres what i got - a Adobe Creative Suite 3 Bible Book.

I’ll read this in the coming days. This will surely help me alot in navigating Adobe CS3. I already have an installer and play with it more.

Aside from the books Ted also gives some Adobe Acrobat User Community ballpen, tshirts and flash drive. Theres more giveaways in the coming workshops.

Am i lucky or what?

Ted Padova and Chris Cubos here in Fwendz Diner.

Ted Padova talks about Adobe Acrobat. Ted is an accomplished Acrobat PDF Book writer.

Chris Cubos tackles about Adobe Flex. He shows how easy to do scripting with Flex. Flex can also be installed in Linux. Flex is new to me. I’m kind of interested.

I’m looking forward for next workshop.