I hate Flash. And I do not know any regular web users who do not feel the same way about it. For those of you that do not know are not familiar with it by name, Flash provides those animated introductions to websites that may possibly be fun once, but soon become an irritation.

My theory is that these Flash intros are the result of a conspiracy between web designers and company bosses who do not know any better.

I can picture the scene. At one end of a room with a big screen behind him stands a man in black with piercings. At the other end sit the suits. They watch as the company logo spins round and some sort of techno music comes out of the speakers. "Great," think the suits. "This is just like our own little TV programme." After all, they never use the web and television is the obvious point of reference. This will probably be the last time they ever look at their company website.

The man in black is happy because he picks up the cheque. His staff get to have fun showing off the tricks they can perform with Flash. Only the poor surfer who is trying to get a bit of information off the site is fed up.

This whole situation is a symptom of the immaturity of the web. The medium is getting in the way of the message.

More than 30 years ago my parents had a friend whose entire record collection con sisted of Herb Alpert and test tones. He did not particularly like Herb Alpert. I do not think he actually liked music. But these recordings showed off the wonders of his hi-fi system.

More recently the birth of desktop publishing (DTP) did terrible things to design. The people with the technical ability to use the software measured success by the number of fonts and special effects they could get onto a single page.

Fortunately DTP has grown up. The programs have become easier to use and have moved out of the hands of the techies and into the hands of the designers. The world is a better-looking place for that.

That is not true of the web. OK, the people creating the sites are called designers, but it is still their technological prowess, the graphical tricks they can do, that is the measure of their ability. It is not the images that are losing out. It is the words.

Look at the top ten websites visited by UK surfers according to online researcher Media Metrix. It is entirely filled with sites that have virtually no graphics on their opening pages. The sites are all household names run by Microsoft, Yahoo! Freeserve and the BBC.

Research involving individual surfers points the same way. At the end of last year Forrester Research said that high-quality content was the number one reason, cited by 75% of respondents, for returning to a website.

"Content" is an admittedly vague word that can cover everything you see on a website including games, graphics, streamed media and all the other wonders of the net. But the principal form of content is text. Another piece of research, this time by the prestigious Stanford Poynter Institute in the United States, tracks users' eyeballs and finds that they go straight to text on a page rather than the more obvious graphics or adverts.

The lessons from this are not being learned by most website owners. Recently, for instance, my television gave up the ghost and I decide to buy a new one. All the major electrical retailers have websites with illustrations of their products. The problem is that a portable looks the same size as a home cinema. Without clear, written descriptions, the graphics are meaningless.

Whoever coined the phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words" is largely to blame. Take a look through this newspaper and see how many photograph would mean anything without a caption to explain who the participants are and what they are doing. Not many pictures are worth a thousand words.

Even sites where the sole reason for their existence is content often fair poorly. Newspapers, magazines and broadcasters, with a few honourable exceptions, tend to shovel what they use elsewhere straight onto the website. There is no concern as to whether it is appropriate for that medium.

The problem throughout is that while companies are willing to spend substantial amounts of money on website design and backend systems for e-commerce, words remain the poor relation. This should not be the case. Creating a good-looking website is nowhere near as difficult as it was even a couple of years ago. That should free-up cash for content.

There is also a commercial logic from another medium. Only one of the 10 largest- circulation magazines in the UK is not branded by a well-known business. The companies are spending their money to attract revenue from their customers.

Often spending it on their websites would make far more sense. Instead of a customer having to visit a shop or at least pick up the phone, they are only a mouse-click away from buying something.

But it is not enough to bung text created for another medium straight onto a website. Surfers first want descriptive headlines, bullet points and short summaries. But behind that bite-size content they want to be able to dig deeper. That is where the internet really comes into its own because there are none of the physical limitations imposed by the printed page or broadcasters' time.

The final argument for the importance of words on the web is simple. You can't put a Flash graphic into a search engine.

• Nick Clayton is managing director of internet content company Penpusher.com