Web design is like crowd-sourcing dating advice: everyone has a different opinion about what is pretty, and what you should be looking for. We can all think of a pretty and fun site rendered totally in flash, and many sites seek to copy that . . . to be talked about and remembered for their eye-candy. And for some sites, and in some industries, that's expected, and totally fine.
For instance, graphic designers - they should love flash. It shows off the pretty things they can make and animate. But business sites, especially sites with brick-and-mortar should shy away. The fact is - flash is a burdensome beast that will slow even higher-end computers to a crawl at times; and flash is totally inaccessible via mobile phone. And let's be clear - there are more internet-ready mobile devices than there are computers on the internet.
One of the reasons I restarted this blog here, with this design, is to find my "web-zen." I prefer text, and all my pretty buttons in HTML, instead of graphics and flash. If you come to my site, you come to experience the content - which, at this point, is largely text. The photos, audio, or video you may encounter here should load quickly, and be easy to navigate.
I like clean. Flash, on the other hand, is anything but clean. The animations make it slow to navigate, and if the content you're wanting to reference is 3-5 clicks in, it's just obnoxious. At my current job, we have very little flash on our site - and I'm on a mission to squash what is there. It's counterintuitive to any business that wants to sell or service anything other than pretty graphics and animations. Make your sites simple, easy to navigate, and make the most important content to your users easily accessible in intuitive ways.
Apple scored a hit with their iPhone because of those key points - oh... and the iPhones don't have flash either.
No comments:
Post a Comment