13
Feb
Too much of anything can be a bad thing. But too much Flash could be costing you visits to your website. We have a look at some of the reasons Flash is not always the best solution and why indeed many web gurus avoid it all together.
Flash is a phenomenal technology. In the days when web standards were poorly adopted, browsers weren’t very sophisticated and connection speeds were poor, Flash changed the way we used the web by offering a lightweight, platform independent technology that allowed us to deliver very rich multimedia experiences.
Of course with great power comes great responsibility and as such we were plagued by hideous Flash sites, bad pre-loaders, splash screens and a host of highly irritating methods of implementing site navigation. Fortunately things have moved on, or rather web developers have moved on and now tend to stick to using Flash for what it really works for - animation and multimedia content delivery.
We still see our fair share of entirely Flash based websites however, particularly popular with huge brands - Nike, Audi, Sony etc. Personally I dislike Flash when used to entirely displace conventional hypertext based sites. Why? The telephone is a universally ubiquitous design. It doesn’t matter if I am in Japan, Australia, Mexico or Manchester, if I pick up a phone I will be able to use it. The same is true of the world wide web - within reason.