Is Your Flash Site Hindering Your Business?
Being an owner of an online media business, obviously I always need to be on top of what design and marketing practices are being implemented. While things come and go, it still always makes me cringe every time I land on a 100% flash created website.
Whether it looks good or not, coding your site 100% in flash basically does more harm than good.
For those unfamiliar with how web coding and design works, there are basically two form of sites: flash and non-flash. Take the following example to help distinguish the difference:
Compare two identical parks: Park 1 is trapped within a glass box (flash site); Park 2 is not (non-flash site).
Which park do you think people will go to? Obviously the one not in a glass box because people can go into the park and interact with all the amenities it has to offer. Nobody just wants to look at the park just from the outside. This is exactly the effect flash has on a site.
- Search engine spiders can’t read it.
- Usability for readers is just horrendous.
- There are no back buttons and no right click options.
Overall, the functionality and usability of flash sites are completely pointless and not solving our main problems.
Moreover, the overall design appeal of flash sites tend to be annoying to most users as well. In today’s internet world we have trained our head to think flashy, animated objects are spam. If we add all these things in our flash site, then what good does it do?
When flash is good to use. While I never believe flash is good except for some game or unique marketing campaign, there are coding techniques that allow flash to take on characteristics of non-flash sites; however, that requires some deep pockets, which is never really good on our bottom line.