Flash Versus Functionality

Mary Diamond

Tuesday August 17, 2010

In the last several months I've had a handful of semi-heated discussions with my cohorts about whether or not Flash should be used at all in our client sites. Keep in mind here that I'm the bookish creative writing type of geek, while most of the conversations I've had have been with a programming guru with a seeming distaste for flamboyant or unnecessary decoration.

Our resident JavaScript ninja pointed out to me that while flash may look "flashy" on a site I'm viewing from my desk at home, that same page may be completely inaccessible to a person viewing it from a handheld device. Medium sized gadgets (netbooks, iPads) may be able to handle the flashiness -but the processing time may be affected and in the time it takes for flash animations to load you might just lose your potential visitor to a lack of patience.

Let's face it: the current prominence of instant gratification and sites designed specifically for mobile devices makes for a pretty good case against flash in general. Why pay to have twice as much code written (the mobile site designed separately from the flashy main site) when you can just design a site that conveys your information with a minimum of clutter and is viewable from any point of connectivity?

Broadband users probably won't have much trouble waiting a few seconds for a flash site to load, dial-up users barely even count any more and the number of people accessing your site from their phone, PDA or other portable internet device are rapidly growing. The question has been addressed by plenty of big names in the industry and still gets tossed around between clients, programmers, techies and anyone else who spends time online.

One of our potential customers pointed out several of his competitor's sites to me and explained how the cool colors and light shows made it look more professional and caught his attention, expressly stating that he wanted his site to look like those. At the time, I didn't have a retort. Then again, I was using a flip phone back then and had no idea what it was like to browse the web from my G1.

In the weeks of sporadic research I've done since then, I've discovered that both sides have a legitimate point; the pro-flash contenders want a site that really pops visually, and the anti-flash crowd is all for asthetics -as long as they don’t end up bogging down the functionality of the site. Flash isn't the only way to make a site stand out, but where is the middle ground?

Whether or not to use flash depends on what you’re trying to accomplish, but remember this: ten years ago the idea of designing a web site for a visitor on a cell phone wouldn’t have been worth consideration... where will we be accessing the web from ten years into the future? Will blinking lights and animations ever be more important than getting your information across to the viewer? Probably not.