Gary wrote this in
Design & Development
on 17-May-2010
- 11/11/11 at 11.11.11
- Google+ “It’s already good for rankings”
- Whoo hooo, Pebble Mailer editor just got a facelift...
- How wide should E-news and EDM's really be?
- Get more from your mobile traffic
- Beautiful one day - Promoted the next
- Why Trip Advisor is getting a bad review
- Your Website's New Year's Resolutions
- Why Permission Marketing Is the Future of Online Advertising
- The Queensland Floods and the power of Social Marketing
From the Blog
11/11/11 at 11.11.11
amazing to have all one's in date and time, we stopped for a second. More
From the Blog
Google+ “It’s already good for rankings”
Google+ hasn’t even been around 6 months yet, and it’s considered a major player in the social media realm. It regularly draws comparisons to both Facebook and Twitter. But, Google+ does have one thing going for it that currently Facebook and Twitter doesn’t: it’s good for rankings… in Google. Imagine that. More
From the Blog
Whoo hooo, Pebble Mailer editor just got a facelift...
Many new features have been added to the the Pebble Mailer system by our awesome partners in Sydney. As online email marketing becomes a part of our daily lives, this now makes things even easier for us all. Read on for more info and to watch the video. More
From the Blog
How wide should E-news and EDM's really be?
You’ve probably noticed that the majority of email newsletters you receive these days are designed with a fixed width as opposed to a fluid layout. More
From the Blog
Get more from your mobile traffic
With more and more users accessing the web from mobile devices, can you be sure you are capitalising on this new traffic source? More
From the Blog
Beautiful one day - Promoted the next
Tourism Queensland promotion blitz steps up its game. More
From the Blog
Why Trip Advisor is getting a bad review
TripAdvisor.com is the foremost travel advisory website pushing transparency on to the hotel industry. But as TripAdvisor’s 2011 Dirtiest Hotels are announced, it leads us to ask, "Are the reviews really as good as we think?" More
From the Blog
Your Website's New Year's Resolutions
We're all now well into the swing of things for 2011. So why not think about your New Year's resolutions for your business? Here's 5 things you can do for 2011 to improve your online performance. More
From the Blog
Why Permission Marketing Is the Future of Online Advertising
The concept of “Permission Marketing” isn’t new; in fact, Seth Godin’s 1999 book about “turning strangers into friends and friends into customers” seems remarkably prescient in today’s age of “Friending,” “Liking,” and “Following.” More
From the Blog
The Queensland Floods and the power of Social Marketing
See how social marketing has made the Queensland Floods one of the most accessed news item world wide. More
To Flash or Not to Flash
If you had a retail store, would you make your customer wait outside the shop for a few minutes before they can come in? Then why do it on your website? Flash has its place and its not an entire website.
Let's face it. The internet in 1996 was pretty boring.
And to be honest .. seeing lots of things moving around on a website is pretty cool.
Where is all began
When Macromedia purchased a little vector-based web animation software called FutureSplash Animator, which was competing with their Macromedia Shockwave program, Macromedia had odds-on was to be the next big thing. And it was.
Dupped as Flash, Macromedia (Now Adobe) gave us designers a way to add another level to the creativity of web design and add value to interactivity of websites.
As the internet became more popular and more competitive, animation was being commonly used to create something different in response to producing more advanced websites that would stand out against the crowd.
And for a good marketing agency, selling a design concept with objects moving around the screen and sound blasting out of the speakers was like shooting fish in a barrel. We all lapped it up.
In 2009 Adobe Flash was surpassing 100 million installations worldwide delivering rich Internet applications.
Is it about to end?
Nearly 15 years since Flash's first entrance into the world stage, the internet's evolved and so have we. The heavy weight plug-in installation of Flash's software is not delivering usability over our expectance of animated websites.
The web is the most used resource and when you want repeat visitors to your website, having your customers sitting in front of your website watching the percentage slowly tick over to 100% is not going to encourage them to hang around a second time.
Don't get me wrong, Flash is a very powerful tool and allows us to easily create web animation .. but that's the problem.
It made us all very very lazy.
It was too easy to make a fully animated websites with amazing colours and graphics, fonts and moving pictures, sounds and interactivity.
And it was very easy to sell and it was very expensive to change.
A typical web consumer today is not extremely patient and the amazing features of what Flash has too offer is so passé that it no longer offers the competitiveness it once use to. We've watched the Bounce Rate of our full flash websites increase each day which proves to us that customers are loosing interest. And the fact that Apple's dropped Flash support for iPhones and iPads its just another nail in the coffin.
So .. I shouldn't have any animation?
Heck no! You should have lots. Your website should be a feature rich multi-media window with amazing colours and graphics, font's and moving pictures, sounds and interactivity.
Us designers and developers just need to stop being so lazy.
With the rise of CSS3, HTML5 and dynamic scripting, we can nearly do everything Flash is able to do. Flash should be used today to complement and enhance an ready awesome website. As there are still some types of effects and animation which Flash does easily that we are still are a little away from replicating yet.
I don't believe you
The Sofitel Brisbane is an example of a completely cross-device compatible website. The only Flash used is the glitter effect when you over the Sofitel Chain Logo on the home page. Otherwise its all just made up of some very clever coding.
Its fast to load, its easy to change, its integrated into the clients Content Management System, it doesn't need any additional software, its fully Search Engine Optimised and its viewable on an iPhone, an iPad and other non-flash supported devices
A flash website is none of these.
This is only the beginning and there are already some awesome sites out there which are just as feature-rich as a full Flash build.
Featured Case Study
Sofitel Brisbane Central
With one place to enter in their content, the Sofitel Brisbane website controls the layout across multiple areas of their entire site. This allows a dramatic reduction in administration overheads and reduces the risk of error through duplicate entry. More
