No wonder why Jacob Nielsen said: “About 99% of the time, the presence of Flash on a website constitutes a usability disease.” He explains that Flash “tends to degrade websites for three reasons: it encourages design abuse, it breaks with the Web’s fundamental interaction principles, and it distracts attention from the site’s core value.”
Not to say that Flash is bad and not to be used at all. It may have a good application for online games, for example, or used sparingly for certain websites.
However, it’s not a good idea to use Flash in general for the following reasons:
- Slow load time: Many users find it annoying to wait until Flash has been fully loaded before viewing a website.
- Plugin required: Many users have to install or constantly update a plugin in order to be able to view Flash-based sites.
- Not compatible with all devices: As more people are using mobile devices, they are frustrated with Flash-based sites, especially on Apple mobile devices that do not support Flash. TechCrunch states that iOS had a 67% browser share in November 2012 – which is a significant market to be ignored.
- Bad for accessibility and SEO: While there are ways to make Flash sites more accessible, they are not as accessible and easy to use as HTML-only websites and are also not friendly to search engines.
- Expensive to maintain: Since Flash is proprietary, it costs more money and time to maintain Flash-based sites than HTML-only websites that can be created and updated in any program and on any platform or even online if using a CMS (content management system) such as WordPress. Using Flash is like using Photoshop – you can edit only the original file and only in an program it was created in.
That said, I would advise businesses to not to use Flash for most of their websites in order to have more happy users.
Source Reference: http://svk-nyc.com/
Well, just some remarks,
ReplyDeleteSpeed:
Yes, when you load a flash website it takes time to load, however, that's not entirely the case nowadays as you can load data from XML files into your flash website, so the website will contain like 100 images but load in the same time as a normal HTML website loads, data being grabbed from XML loads only on action so this saves lots of loading time.
Plugins: Almost every new browser have flash integrated, if not installed automatically with windows, the problem will be with users still using old browsers and don't know how to install flash plugin, for this, i recommend using a script that checks if the browser have flash player installed or not, if not, display a static version of the website, everybody's happy.
Accessibility: Flash websites are designed to be fun, mysterious, booming, they make you want to click all buttons to see what happens and have fun while receiving the information, it depends on the designer strategy and the target audience, i.e. in 2010 saatchi and saatchi made a website that only marketing people know what to do, where to click, if a grandpa logs in and tries to check the website he won't go anywhere, so yes, flash designers have to take note for which target audience this website is for.
SEO: Some workarounds can be implemented to play around with URL targeting people from search engines to specific sprites or actions on the homepage, i tired it and it was extremely appealing, however, Google won't be able to read data from inside the xml files or the .swf files, so meta description and social tagging (GEO, OP, Twitter cards) are very important if u want ur flash website to appear in search results
Overall: flash is fun, yet tricky.
So, build a flash website or not would only depend on what the brand need, their target audience, their marketing strategy and of course Creativity.
:) Cheers
Thanks for your comments as it helps giving wider view ;)
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