SEO vs. Design - Round 1: Steel Cage, No-Holds-Barred Death Match

Recently, I’ve been reading a ton of “where has all the beauty on the internet gone” swan songs about the death of Flash and the rise of an “uglier internet”. A steady theme in all these articles is how the necessity of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the biggest, ugliest foe to contend with since Google can’t easily see the content in a complex Flash file. So, while in the black corner, SEO may be leading with big, sweeping upper-cuts, in the red corner, design is countering by throwing jabs and working the mid-section… a constant, classic battle between function and form.

What can I say, the internet has changed. The days of big, beautiful “Flash experiences” have been replaced with speed and usability. The reality is that SEO has in many cases become a company’s entire marketing budget. And why shouldn’t it be? It legitimately allows a company to quantitatively measure success of its advertising plan. In the current economic climate, that’s particularly important to small businesses.

The fact is, like color or size restrictions in print media, SEO is an obstacle that designers have to work with. Notice… I said “with” and NOT “around” or “against”. This is a particularly acute distinction. Effective design is not a matter of working the square peg into the round hole... it’s finding the happy balance between the two and making them play nice to assure functional requirements do not destroy visual or contextual beauty.

It’s become a challenge that we have to address with all of our clients. It’s also the primary reason we’ve developed an SEO friendly CMS where users can alter title and meta data on their own. This shift in the industry has welcomed a wide array of solutions that have forced us to use new technologies in innovative new ways. For instance, while we love Flash, we use it sparingly. In its place, our developers use Javascript frameworks like MooTools and JQuery to create cool motion and navigation effects that embed key content on into the HTML; a major functional requirement for Google.

The point is, if anything, the web has become a very useful and very beautiful place. The rise of social media, the impact of SEO and the improvements of CSS and HTML have made web development a sweet science and the internet a sweet place to be. The irony is that I still see useless Flash sites popping up left and right. Don’t get me wrong, I have no beef with Flash if it’s used properly. I just find that there are generally better, more accessible solutions where aesthetic charm is not sacrificed to functional necessity.

Up next… Round 2: SEO and O3.