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March 27, 2005
Flash Epidemic
Recently, there has been a large increase in Flash designed sites. The “new” cool, its called. Well, I tell you what, lets hope people see the light and the new cool will go away. So what exactly is wrong with Flash? I am sorry, there is nothing wrong with Flash. It is that it is often misused to create such monsters. Flash is a nice tool for constructing web animations, photo/movie galleries and quick/dirty games (for those who don’t know any real programming). However, many designers have took it further: introductory splash pages (those should never exist) or even worse: whole Flash sites. Imagine that.
Flash pages are harder to navigate and are less accessible. To make matters worse, many designers deploy non-standard GUI controls (e.g customized scroll bars). Okay, screw the scroll bars. They are filled with tons of redundant animation. People read web pages to absorb information, not to watch red and blue bricks float up and down the screen. Flash pages lack the most basic elements of website navigation such as a back button, link colours and search (not to mention text size and encoding). On top of that Flash distracts webmasters updating content. Oh, they are harder to index on search engines too.
Posted by Oleg Ivrii at March 27, 2005 08:01 PM