In my daily search for awesome church websites I also stumble, as you can imagine, upon websites that are not so well designed.

To give you a better idea, for every website that is featured on CSS Religion, I see about 50 other ones that don’t make the cut. Among those there are church websites that are entirely built in Flash. Honestly, I don’t even look at them. My browser is set to show me Flash content only if I click on it. So I just close the tab and continue why my list.

Why you should not use Flash?

Up until a few days ago the biggest argument against Flash was that it doesn’t work on most mobile devices. Imagine a person with an iPad wants to visit your church website, but when they open it, all they see is an empty screen. The chances that person will return are close to zero.

Although the user experience remains the main reason to avoid Flash, Google has decided to step in and display a warning message in the search results on mobile devices. Why? A better user experience for the people that use Google Search.

So if you’re reading this and your church website is built in Flash, please update it! Your visitors will be grateful.