May 24th, 2010 | Scott Elkin, Technical Director

We have been preaching to our clients for years to stop using flash on their websites.  A website makes less money to the degree of flash and animation it uses.

Users don’t need to see ‘spinning globes’ and ‘dancing flowers’.  They need to be told what problem you solve and given the to solve it by buying your services.

It is one thing when a car dealership puts up a huge blow-up Santa Claus to get you to come into their dealership (an online equivalent to an advertisement on a website).

You would NEVER see a dealership stick a blow-up Santa Claus in the middle of their rows of cars (the equivalent of using flash animation throughout your site).  That would just distract their customers from the real reason they are there.

And now with the wide adoption of the iPad and iPhone, which both don’t support flash, your site will be even worse.  You will have huge holes in your website where flash once was.  And if you were using flash for you site navigation, your site because unusable.

The reason we needed flash ten years ago, isn’t an issue anymore.  We as web developers have powerful tools to do the same animations as flash, without using flash, so that you can view them in every browser and device.  You still have to use caution to not distract from the main goal of your site, but this is being done every day using tools like jQuery, prototype and mootools.

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