Without getting into one of those endless Flash=bad/Flash=good
arguments, my beefs with Flash for a company's web site are:
1) No CMS (that I know of), so content usually changes very slowly,
because you have to upload a whole new Flash package to make the
smallest change.
2) Little SEO, so the company is obviously not interested in being
found by a search engine. That's OK, I guess, but a little short-
sighted in my opinion. Anywhere you can get someone to find you is a
potential piece of work.
3) No blog integration (that I know of), and the companies that I
like often have a blog. It gives me a little hint as to what they
think and where their priorities are.
4) Not viewable on an iPhone (or most others, for that matter). That
means that if you are on the road and trying to reach them, need a
contact number or email and not at a desktop, you are out of luck. In
this case, they don't even redirect to a page with directions - you
just get a page that doesn't render properly. That's just not
acceptable.
5) Most of the time, you can do what an all Flash site does with an
embedded Flash piece where you need it, which solves problems 1, 2 and
3. In this case, that city photo they have with the helicopter and
lightning is cute but completely unnecessary. They seem to have
avoided the 100% Flash situation, but the page doesn't render well
without it anyway, which breaks the rule of failing gracefully. For a
company home page,I submit that's again, not acceptable.
6) The whole rotating thing that people do with Flash always reminds
me of neon signs and electronic billboards (and scoreboards). In a
word, tacky and irritating. Now, that isn't exactly a problem with
Flash, but with how companies like this one use it on their Web sites.
If they want to present themselves as tasteless and in-your-face, that
might work for some clients, but it's not a company I'd want to work
for either.
Full disclosure: I recently quit working for a company that had an all
Flash site.. My title was VP of Creative Solutions.The CEO insisted
that some day Flash would replace HTML on the Web. I told him he was
wrong, plus most of the above. They went with it anyway, despite my
vehement protests. Since then, most of people who were working for
them have left and they are being sued by a Placement Agency.
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