Do you like Flash Menus? They are sooo nice, but what is the truth about their usability?
Most of the people don‘t know anything about the side effects of using Macro media Flash for main navigation and in most cases they are wondering why their website is not properly indexed by search engines and they don‘t really get any traffic. The story is very simple and easy to understand. Search Engine use the so called "spiders" to crawl the web and index web pages. Those spiders are computer programs that view your HTML code and translate it into their machine language which later on is rated using specific algorithm. The problem here is that "spiders" are not humans and they don‘t see images or flash animations. They are not able to understand where those links point and therefore they don‘t follow (index) them.
In all cases its best if you can use footer menu in addition to the main navigation. In the footer menu its advisable to put links to all important pages on your website in order to make sure that they will be indexed properly.
Also its strongly advisable that you should sacrifice the beauty of Flash Menus and put regular links coded with CSS (in order to look nice) because some people don‘t even have Flash installed on their computers and this will make your website inaccessible for them.
From my own experience I find that styled links are the best way to implement website navigation and this makes it very easy for search engines to index your website and rank you on your deserved position on all search engines!