Flash is a popular or unpopular way to display your presence online. As far as my experience goes, every company wants “some sort” of flash on their website and the users don’t want to wait for the flash to load. Its a classiqe lock. As a rule, when we talk about companies and users, we talk about majority, exceptions are many and I am talking my experience. Flash is disabled in my PC too. Even are the images too, but are allowed when its critical. Flash is not allowed, absolutely!
I am not against flash, but I am against misuse of flash.
How many times, we get a request to make a website and “please add some flash to it.” As a web company, we oblige, knowing perfectly its useless for the client. Never mind, most clients websites just hang out there not performing any function.
So, this major client of mine client of mine calls up and wants flash on his portal. This is a tricky situation.
I did not tell no. I said “ok.” Took the client through the regular routine of need investigation. Fortunately, it turned out that the entire flash animation will take long to load. So, we decided to create a front page static banner and link it to a page. I hope every webbey gets into such situation.
Another curious case was when a medium sized manufacturer called, he wanted an entire website out of flash. As usual, like all clients , refered me to some websites he thinks matches his scheme of things. The clients website to be bade had provisions for tutorials and trouble shooting guides. His clients had to refer the website (when made) for technical support. So, the arguments were, if the client has to come again and again to your website, and flash has to load every time, then the other pages have to load (because of the size,), its impractical. Finally, the client confessed that the website suggestion was from his clients feedback and he wanted to make a flash website to impress.
The above three scenarios are typical to any web development company. So, what is the solution.
A simple yet effective image can suffice for your web site branding. Your website graphics should be minimal unlike print graphics (i am sure print guys subscribe to minimalistic graphics view too), which will enable faster loading. Internet users are not very kind to the websites, which don’t load faster. Another way to look at is , your home page might not be the best page (first impression does matter but not the way you are thinking).
So how do we flash?
Keep flash in a page , other than home page. (somehow) Warn the user that it is a flash link or page. If you think your products have to be shown interactively on internet, use ajax. If you think, the product has to be in flash, then make it has a down loadable object like PDF. Flash is good for Games and interactive learning, again, programes like Anark steal the thunder from flash in many ways.
I know some dudes , who make page loading look like a html page loading, so what about the search engine optimisation?
I have given my opinion, you decide now!
January 29th, 2010 at 8:55 am
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