MacLuddite

I’m at the dentist, nervous, in pain, and wondering how much my negligence is going to cost, when he starts asking questions about developing web sites. Actually, the questions were really intelligent and made a lot of sense. It was kind of an odd sensation, having someone not in the I.T./design/developer profession start a conversation with me about this. It turns out there was a reason, and it had nothing to do with just trying to make conversation, or the Novocain. The practice where Dr. Steve is a dentist had come to the realization that the flash website they paid to have developed had a serious shortcoming. No one could find it.

Anyone concerned about providing even the most basic information about their business to the public would balk immediately if you explained you wanted them to pay for a site that wasn’t going to be indexed by search engines. What is the point of having a site if it’s hard or impossible for potential customers/clients to find.

Here comes the painful part. Two of my favorite restaurants have flash web sites and I don’t know how, or if, I should tell them the unpleasant truth. One is in the neighborhood, and I am casual friends with the owners. They are not technical people, they are foodies that run a small business and have full lives. They seemed moderately excited to finally have a site, but I got the feeling that they didn’t expect to actually get any new business because of it. They’re right, they probably won’t, but not for the reasons they think.

Restaurants have to be one of the least likely candidates for flash sites. Especially ones that change their menu on a regular basis. Why would people be looking for a restaurant’s web site? To see the menu, get the address or phone number, that’s it. Nice static pages made with (X)HTML and CSS, or maybe a simple CMS if they have ambitions to do more, would better serve their needs. Generally speaking, the one positive I can think of in regards to using flash for this task is that the site will look better on marginal computers with small screens and bad browsers. One would think the owners of those machines are not exactly the clientele that eats out often, but I could be wrong. The negatives are almost too numerous, but can be separated into two major categories.

• Business Issues:
• Flash is search engine hostile. If they can’t find you… obviously no increase in business.
• It’s highly unlikely (PDF) that all of your clientele have a broadband connection. Flash is bloated, do you really want to make people wait when they can literally click a button to find other options?
• Does everyone have the latest flash player installed? If they can’t view your site… well, they can’t view your site. Seriously, when was the last time you upgraded the flash player that came with your computer?
• No mobile device support to speak of. You may not think of this as important now, but the guy I sat next to at a coffee shop recently that was writing a paper on a blackberry does. Later, he was looking for a place to take his parents for dinner using the phone. This is the future. Think I’m kidding, look at Japan.
• Do you have products or information like a map to your business on your site? With a flash site, you need to realize a visitor can’t just bookmark a page, or send a link to a friend showing them the information. Your making it difficult for the very people you want to visit your business.
• For even the most basic of changes you are forced to return to the original developer. This is a form of vendor lock in, and in my opinion is somewhere between evil and just inconvenient when you need something changed, depending on the relationship with the developer.

• Usability Issues:
• Regarding flash intros - people hopefully come to your site for information, not to watch a presentation or cartoon. The first time it can range from being tolerable to entertaining, if it’s done well. During subsequent visits, it just becomes tedious. Boring people or wasting their time is never a good idea.
• Most of the time using flash breaks the back button and the address bar, this confuses and frustrates people who navigate using those items. You can’t bookmark a page or print the content in any meaningful way. I’ve got all this technology at my disposal, and I have to copy your address or phone number down with a graphite stick, or retype it.
• Most flash sites have terrible navigation and no bread crumb system in place to help guide visitors. Theoretically, the designer has total control over these elements, so one would think it could be made functional as well as pretty. I just don’t see a lot of that happening, maybe because it adds a layer of complexity or additional work and cost. Design is about more than how something appears.
• The common practice of having text you have to scroll to read in a tiny embedded area is an insane practice. Peoples’ displays are actually getting larger, why not utilize the screen real estate. Not to mention it’s irritating and inconvenient. I’ll say it again, design is about more than how something appears.
• Can’t search sites or pages, you just have to keep clicking until you find what your looking for. Think about that for a minute. Someone is actually going to the trouble of entering data on a computer, but not letting you search it.
• The larger or smaller text controls in your browser won’t work, and people that depend on screen readers are left out completely. Large companies are now realizing what an expensive mistake this could turn out to be.
• If the site is in a language you don’t speak, forget about using services like Google Language Tools.

There are also philosophical reasons for not using flash that should be given some thought. The internet works because of a set of open standards. In other words anyone can write a browser, send an email, or host a web site because of the fact that the computers that make up the net communicate using the same basic “languages”. Think of other major infrastructures you use everyday. Imagine if the electrical connectors on your appliances came in random shapes and sizes, or if the pipes that make up your plumbing were different sizes depending on the manufacturer. Standards make large systems possible, without them, there would be chaos. On the internet, anything that subverts that open ability to communicate is a potential problem. The fact is, flash is a proprietary program that runs inside your browser, piggy-backing on the good will of the open system already in place. You could equate flash to a potential trojan horse, owned by one company that has no obligation to update it, fix bugs, or give it away forever. It is a revenue stream for Adobe, and that’s a bad thing to insert into an open system on which people rely.

A few blocks from my house is a flower shop, a nice shop. It would be considered by most to be “the” flower shop in the neighborhood. Searching for “north Denver flower shop”, “Denver highlands flowers”, “north Denver florist” won’t tip you off to their existence. They unfortunately have a flash web site.

Flash is an amazing tool for certain tasks, and I understand the allure. For entire web sites though, it’s almost always the wrong tool for the job. Eventually, Dr. Steve and his partners solved the problem. They paid to have the site redeveloped, not using flash the second time around.