Why Are There So Many Flash Sites?

Flash-based sites have been a craze since the past few years, and as Macromedia puts more and more great features into Flash, you can be sure there will be more and more flash websites around the Internet. Flash looks pretty with all those neat graphics, gradients, animations and cool sound effects. Flash is the favorite toy of big designer studios and numerous amateur graphic artists alike. Flash is visually attractive.

Down With Flash Websites!

My mother used to have a saying.... "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink".  Have you ever looked up information that led you to a web site and when you finally got to the web site, you were waiting forever for the page to load? Chances are that if the page took forever to load, you didn’t hang around to wait for it. Although speed of connections may be increasing, the amount of time that people are willing to wait for a page to load or the time it takes to find something is decreasing or staying at those short time limits. With more and more people using the Internet to do business as well as connect with other people, it seems like no one has the patience to wait.

Companies are spending thousands of dollars years attracting clients to their websites. But what happens once they get them? It is becoming more and more difficult to turn visitors into clients as the competition on the search engines reaches all time highs.

The not so complete consensus on the internet is that a web page needs to load in around 4 seconds or less before you can start to lose visitors. Despite the statistics designers continue to ignore the documented problems with flash design. Businesses are continuing to use a flash base in website design, without regard of the challenges an all flash site poses for search engine rankings and SEO (not to mention usability).

Why Not To Use Flash

• Visitors Have Little or No Patience  Users have to wait longer than usual to load Flash content compared to regular text and images, and some visitors might just lose their patience and click the Back button. The longer your Flash takes to load, the more you risk losing visitors. Not only does Flash violate the 4 second rule, but the visitor is compelled to click an arrow to proceed with the presentation.

• Visitors have to download the Flash player in advance Not everyone  will be willing to download the Flash player just to view your site. You'll also have to put in additional work in redirecting the user to the Flash download page if he or she doesn't have the player installed.

• Flash requires bandwidth  Despite of the DSL Internet access being available almost everywhere, there are still millions of people surfing the Net via dialup or other limited bandwidth connection. Flash files, especially those using sound effects, embedded movies or bitmap images, can take a while to load.

• Flash Very Often Has A Disabled Back Button  Some Flash designers use meta refreshes or other tricks to disable browser’s Back button. As the famous usability expert Jacob Nielsen says, ‘Back button is the second most important navigation element after hyperlinks’. People not able to use Back button will click the third most important navigation element - that X button in the top right.

• Flash ignores visitors needs  The basic rules of marketing emphasize the concentration on the users’ needs, Flash websites ignore them their visitors needs.

Take the infamous site intros and splash screens that are as much annoying as the 45 minutes of advertising and previews in cinemas. Or another example: the sound effects - they are can be especially inappropriate and harmful when you are browsing the Net from a cubicle in a quiet office or from home in the late hours.

• Problems with third-party Flash developers  Many web designers code their project to prevent them from editing, thus making you to hire them over and over again as you need to do even the smallest modifications. Aaron Wall in his SEOBook (a highly recommended SEO reading) describes a case of a Flash developer who disabled the back button and then asked $4000 from his client to re-enable it, although the problem was caused by his own incompetence.

• Search engines do not like Flash Not every search engine is able to crawl and index the content of Flash movies. Even those that can often do it with errors. This is in particular the case of a website fully implemented in Flash as a single file. Search engines just wouldn’t be able to direct visitors to the proper page within that file. Hence, you will not be able to rank well in search engines and there will be less traffic heading to your site.

You Be The Judge!

Lets assume you're like to compare the Kia Rhondo with one of it's competitors - Visit Kia.com

• As soon as you enter the site you're faced with a decision - which arrow?

• After you select an arrow - here comes another flash page

• You can be sure it's going to take a few minutes of clicking to get to where you want.

Actually the brain dead designers of this site seem to think everyone loves to spend the next ten minutes looking at their online brochure. Considering you only have less than 10 seconds to capture a visitors attention, nearly 90% of the visitors have decided to move on and will attempt to find the answers to their questions elsewhere. Shame on Kia....

Compare the Kia.com site with Honda's ..... Is it any wonder that Honda is heads above everyone in sales and marketing? Even Toyota has at least had the foresight go give their visitors a few option beyond their Flash presentation.