It's the age-old problem: my graphic designers want the site to look cool with Flash, I want it to actually be found (go figure!). I'd appreciate your input on whether the method I describe will allow both:

The designers want the intro (which is only about 100k) to take up the entire screen, so I'm loading the SWF in a 100% width/height DIV above all other DIVs on the home page. The first time a visitor comes to the site, they see the flash intro, and when they click on it, the DIV vanishes, which then reveals all the DIVs underneath that contain text, links, etc., without having to redirect to another page.

The mechanism I'm using to achieve this:

The flash movie itself has a transparent button over the top of it, which calls some JS on the home page that changes the Flash DIV from display:block to display:none. I've programmed the site in .NET, so I've added a "runat=server" tag to the DIV and loaded a Session variable (Session("SawFlash")="True") into it so that on future Page_Load events, the Session variable causes that DIV to default to Visible=False. That way, the visitor only sees it the first time they're on the home page on any given visit.

Do you have any suggestions on improving this method and any feedback on how it will affect SEO? Thanks so much.

Erik

I would use caution because in some ways you are returning different content to engines (users without javascript and flash) than you are users (users with javascript and flash).

This method sounds similar to SWFObject which has actually been called dangerous. At the same time Google has said the "danger" factor is no reason not to use SWFObject.

Your technique might be detected as something bad even if it's not because you could "hide" any content in the div under the Flash. While yours may be 100% white hat, the Flash could say "buy blue pills now click here" and engines wouldn't know. Even if you aren't spamming you might set off spam alarms. Even if the content matches you might set off alarms. At the same time you might set off no alarm. Either way, the site could be banned and that is a risk you should be prepared to take!

YOU MUST be certain that content in the div under the flash is also visible to users with Flash in the Flash. If I were you I might consider placing the text "below" and not "under" the Flash.

One example that comes to mind is http://www.turner.com/ . As you can see there is Flash at the top of the page but text content below.