Using Flash on your website may be driving your customers away.
While we concede that Flash isn't going away immediately, we do
believe that there are good reasons to not choose Flash when developing a
site.
About 7% of browsers do not have Flash enabled. That's an estimated
125 million people worldwide who can't see the 1 in 4 websites that use
Flash.
iOS is the dominant mobile browser, making up over half of that
market. Since Apple refuses to implement flash, 65% of mobile browsers
can't see Flash sites.
While Google can read SWF files, it was built to crawl HTML,
limiting Flash's organic SEO potential.
Flash files are more difficult to update than traditional HTML,
slowing down the frequency of content updates.
Since Flash uses deprecated tags to function, it often isn't W3C
valid.
Flash is proprietary, paid software. The web is built on and prefers
open standards.
Flash breaks context and navigation menus. Back, forward, and right
click don't work in Flash sites.
With DHTML libraries such as jQuery and mootools, special effects
are no longer limited to Flash.
It's important to give up one's tech industry ego and consider their
customer's experience as their first priority. The end user doesn't
care what you did to make your website work, they only care that it
works. Flash limits that experience needlessly.
Felix Hazel is a web designer and photographer. He holds degrees in business and marketing and has taught workshops on both. His only vices are reality TV and talking to his cat.
