New Boston Creative Group

by Shawn Dryden on February 23, 2010

I was recently alerted to a new company (they will remain nameless because of the obvious shame) and went to their website to check them out. When I pulled up the site, I was slowly filled with sadness, mirroring the little animation on the screen that ran while I waited for it to load. The site had been built in Flash and it was terrible. I didn’t need to go through the whole site to know it was terrible, just seeing that initial loading screen was enough. See, Flash sites can be good, they can even be great, but unless you have the expertise or money (to pay someone who does have the expertise), your Flash site will suck. So let’s go through nine ways it will suck specifically.

Problem #1: Please wait while this site loads. Oh, you’ve left already.

Your Flash site will have a screen where users wait while the site loads. Users hate waiting, and in most cases won’t wait. If there is another site that has the same content that is faster than yours, they will find it. Users or customers stuck with your site will just get frustrated and annoyed. Not a good start.

Problem #2: Click to enter even though you’ve entered already.

Either before or after the site loads, your Flash site will greet users with a button to “enter” the site. Sorry, but your users have already left. To get to your site they either typed in the URL exactly, or searched using any number of keyword terms, and luckily for you picked your site out of the results, and in return, you question if they even want to be there. Just let them in already.

Problem #3: I didn’t know you had a site.

Your Flash site will be buried in the search results. Search engines have a hard time indexing Flash sites, if they do at all. So getting your site in the top few search results for your keywords, or just the first page of results, is a losing battle. There are around 14 billion searches in the United States a month, and your site is missing out.

Problem #4: Can I link to that? No? Okay.

Your Flash site won’t have deep-linking ability. People love to share links of things they find and send them in emails, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and on their own websites. Got something cool in a section of your Flash site? Well, too bad, because no one can link to it directly to share it.

Problem #5: That two-minute, unnecessary short film of your logo was great.

Your Flash site will have useless animations. All a user wants to do is view your contact info, but instead they have to wait while the entire website transforms like Optimus Prime, stuff flying across the screen, text dropping in Matrix-style — all of which is unnecessary, takes way too long, and in the end just prevents the user from doing what they want. To top it off, they usually can’t even copy and paste the phone number off of the site because it isn’t selectable.

Problem #6: I didn’t want to look at your site on my phone anyway.

Your Flash site will be unusable on mobile devices. The iPhone, which makes up around 65 percent of mobile web browsing, can’t view Flash content. If a user has a phone that can view Flash, they will quickly find that the experience is less than desired, as the long load times and animations that were annoying on a desktop PC are unbearable on the slower phone connections.

Problem #7: Analytics? We ain’t got no analytics. We don’t need no analytics!

Your Flash site won’t have usage statistics. Want detail reports on visitors, visits, referrers, content, systems, and searches? Well, too bad, because your Flash site won’t be set up correctly to integrate with the tools to do it.

Problem #8: Accessibility. There’s nothing funny about it.

Your Flash site will be inaccessible to handicapped persons. Depending on your audience, this can be a big problem. Older users can’t increase the font size to help readability. Users with poor vision can’t use a screen reader to navigate and use the site. If you don’t think accessibility is a big deal, ask Target how they feel about it.

Problem #9: Content mismanagement. Get it?

Your Flash site won’t give you the ability to easily make updates. Want to update your site occasionally, add a new page, or a new link? Hope you have your web developer on speed dial, because you won’t be able to do it. And later on when you want to rearrange or restyle your site, you will pretty much have to start over because your content and structure are tied together.

Hopefully, seeing all the ways your site will suck when built in Flash will make you reconsider it. If nothing else, make sure you can solve all the problems stated above before proceeding. My recommendation, though, is to just build your site with good ol’ HTML and CSS and avoid the whole mess.