Cameron Conner : The Orange Lemonade

If you go looking for a photographer for a wedding, senior photos, well, whatever really, you’ve probably come across a lot of sites that use flash for the portfolios. Most likely, you go to the site, and you sit there waiting on a loader animation for at least 5-10 seconds, or at worst a minute or two. Then you get to see the photos, but what happens if you want to send someone a link to a particular photo on the site? It’s usually not possible. You’ve just been to a portfolio made in flash.

First, a bit of statistics.

Studies have shown people will, on average, wait on a site to load for 8.5 seconds. Which means, after about 8 seconds, if your potential client hasn’t seen any images, they will leave. Poof. Gone. You’ve lost what could be a big chunk o’ money due to a slow loading site.

Second, usability.

People have become used to normal websites- where the address bar, back & forward buttons work. It’s been that way since the web began, and flash sites generally screw that up completely. People WANT to send their friends/coworkers/family links to things (and chain letters, but that’s another rant). Unless the flash site is extremely well created (and let’s face it, the majority aren’t) that simply isn’t possible.

One study that I found very interesting was done by dack.com. It found that on Tiffany’s website (in 2000, but still extremely relevant), where they had a normal HTML shopping site and a flash version, that participants could find out simple things, such as how much an item was, comparing multiple items, etc 40% faster on the normal HTML site than the flash version. One of the major things that tripped people up? The normal back button didn’t work. And as far as I know (and I make websites for a living, but I could be wrong…) it’s simply not possible to make that work with flash.

Third, Apple.

There’s 50 million iPhones out there. Surely one hell of a lot of iPod Touches, and they’re on target to do well over 1 million iPads by the end of the year. None of which have flash. People are using iPhones and such a lot more than they used to, and that’s only going to go up. Don’t expect flash to come to iPhones/iPads/iPod Touches any time soon, since Apple and Adobe are basically in a holy-war still.

Why should you care? Well, iPhones account for about 25% of the smartphone market. That’s a LOT of people to exclude.

Finally…

Why should you use a technology that forcefully excludes a huge portion of your potential clients and will annoy the rest of them? It’s just bad business sense.

Regular sites simply work faster, better, and in the end really have the upper hand on any flash site. Especially with really cool stuff coming out of JavaScript development at the moment, flash is really, truly, (hopefully) dying a nice, slow, painful death.

Of course, I’m guilty of it too. However, the only reason for that is I simply haven’t had time to fix my site.