How to insert a flash file to your wordpress header?

There are some clients of mine who are very keen on using flash files in their sites. It often end up in a rough debate with me, and both parties got to take deviation. (If you didn’t know, I’m not a fan of using flash.)

Most of the times, I allow them to use flash in a limited way throughout the site. If it’s a static page, we’ll go for small flash elements on each page and for wordpress users, I go for flash headers. Yea, it’s not a good idea actually, because it make you lose some valuable real estate for search engine optimization. But I’ve found a work around to this.

Generally when you use a flash file, these are the problems that you come across.

• Waste of real estate for SEO
• Cross browser compatibility issues
• Non indexability of text used in flash files
• Unwanted code in the html

But with the workaround you can actually, minimize the unwanted code in html, while the other issues will be there.
Alternatively, you can specify your header text instead of the flash file.

This work around should work for all wordpress themes, but I haven’t tested it on all themes, the Kubrik based themes with large headers seems to work.

It’s a simple plugin that we can use to get this problem solved. This plugin helps you to use a flash file anywhere inside your theme, on your header, posts, sidebars anywhere! Pretty cool isn’t it?

Download the plugin here. The credit goes to Michael Bester for developing this plugin.
To use this plugin, upload it to your plugins directory and activate it from plugins menu. Then go to your header.php file in themes directory and replace the header code with the following code –

[kml_flashembed movie="/path/to/your/movie.swf" height="value" width="value" /]

Of course, replace the values with the actual height and width, and the path to the URL where you've saved the swf file.

It works like charm and if you like it do drop a line to Michael.

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