Before I start, I am going to clearly state that in certain circumstances Flash sites can be great, they are often visually amazing and an ease to navigate.
One major problem with Flash is what do you do when Flash is not installed? You may scoff and say well everyone eventually will have it because when they come across a site that needs Flash they will install it. Unfortunately I am one of those people that will not install, why should I waste my time? JUST SHOW ME THE SITE.
This is where my frustrations began:
Over the weekend I was browsing the search engines trying to find Wine farms in the Cape to visit. Via Google I was taken to www.spier.co.za and was presented with the following:
I decided I was going to break the deadlock and install the thing how hard could it be? Well lets put it this way my computer is still Flashless. I expected it to be easy, just a push of the click here button a little wait , then the site would appear. Unfortunately you are taken to the Adobe Webpage and from here on I was lost. I consider myself to be quite computer literate, so what on earth will the average web user do?
I also came across another site www.riverisland.com. on my web travels this week, with the same problem.
If a non-flash visitor enters one of these sites from a Google search, they are going to click straight back to Google and click on the next Website i.e. your competitor ,who will provide them with what they need. I would love to know the stats on the bounce rates, maybe they can prove me wrong.
I am sure the actual number of web users with Flash is quite high, so I suppose these sites are willing to loose a small percentage of visitors.
Whilst Im on my little rant I have 2 more reasons why I personally do not like Flash sites.
1. When Im in South Africa they can take an eternity to load, as I watch the loader slowly move across the page, I sit anxiously aware that at the same time my bandwidth for the month is slowly being gobbled up.
2. How many people actually wait for an introduction page to load? I know I go straight to the skip intro button. I always feel my time is being wasted, this also goes for splash pages. I read a great analogy comparing these pages to the 45 minutes of commercials before a cinema movie (and we all now how annoying these are). It is thought that a user should be able to convert in no more than 5 clicks through your site – therefore with intro pages and splash pages you have already wasted one of these clicks.
At World Wide Creative we provide profitable websites, and we often do not recommend Flash for web marketing reasons. This blog post is well worth the read if you are unconvinced
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/best-uses-of-flash.html
This is actually written by Google itself recommending that Flash may not be the best route.
- Nicola
