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Is it Flash or is it Just Me?
Is it Flash or is it Just Me?
Maybe I am just clueless, but I have a hard time seeing the benefits of using Flash (or related technologies) on a website. Let me elaborate a bit on that. I cannot see any benefits of using Flash on a business site (as opposed to entertainment purposes). I get a good bit of e-mail from readers wondering why we do not Flash the magazine web pages or have nice big fat animations and graphics on the site. Well I first think that these people never tried to script flash to be viewable on all popular browsers, and still make it easy for non-flash browsers to navigate. The maintenance overhead on the site would be horrendous. We can barely keep plain good ol HTML looking the same in most browsers on a day-to-day basis. I am sure that those of you that create web pages or use Flash know exactly what I mean. I think it would be great to have a totally Flashed TIEMdesign- The Graphic Design Magazine, but I cannot find a volunteer to insert and maintain (daily) the code in the 1800+ web pages that comprise TIEMdesign website.
Animations and large graphics are also cool, if they serve a purpose. If not, please save me from falling asleep or getting bored and leaving before the page loads. Only a small percentage of users have T1 (1.5mbs) or broadband connections. Remember the largest majority of users still have 28.8-56k analog modems. I love nice graphics, but there are ways to lighten the download time. We at the magazine learned the hard way that readers will not wait for large graphics to load; they will simply go elsewhere. We tried large splash page graphics and were losing over 18% of our readers right there on the main page, we finally changed to a light graphics and text version and reduced the loss of readers to under 4%. The facts speak for themselves.
If someone can invent or re-engineer the Flash (or flash related technologies) format that does not require a plugin and will show properly in almost any browser then I think it would be more appropriate for use in almost any situation or web site. At least freeze the development of all Flash graphics (or related) formats and wait for the browsers to catch up before adding new and neat things to the technologies and formats. I am just more than slightly tired of constantly updating my browser, plug-ins and extra software just so I can view a single web page. So please slow it down and let it mature before adding anything spiffy or new.
Dont get me wrong, I think Flash is an excellent medium, but too much of one thing can be detrimental. Just like in the old days of the Web, people went crazy over the Blink tag (just gouge my eyes out right now if I have to see one more blink tag).
Allen Harkleroad
TIEMdesign
Copyright (c) 2000, Allen Harkleroad, All Rights Reserved