Ok from the horses mouth - Flash or not to Flash, we are a web design agency and have a flash site and an html site for those who do not like to add plugins and of course those who are not aloud. The performance of the flash site is poor, we have studied our performance for a year now and the general feedback was to lose the flash site - we have now produced a new database driven site which allows us to update the pages relevant to each of our departments. IE. HR - people who have no skills in html can just add our new job postings by just cut and pasting from a text document to a form field.

I have been to clients properties and sat their and waited for our site to load, once loaded looks cool - (it should be) - it is just to much. The key to flash has to be 'Snippets' little movies that load like graphics, equally fun and good looking adds interactivity to a site, whilst quick on the down load.

Then there are sites which need flash to add that spark to a site, like theme parks, and perhaps Zoo's and movies, all need to be eyecatching thats when I would have a full flash site or advise a client to have a full flash site.

Anyway thats enough from me

On 11:58:54 16 May 2001 Sam wrote:
>To Flash or not to Flash? Where do you stand?
>
>Flash everywhere? Flash sucks? Flash to add value
>selectively? Have your say...
>
>>>>This posting is part of e-consultancy's
>Interactive White Paper entitled 'Content that works'.
>Throughout the paper, there are 18 topical questions like
>this, linked to the e-consultancy forums, where you can
>have your own say on the issues raised.<<<
>
>Click here for more info about the paper and to download
>it for free:
>
>http://www.e-consultancy.com/book/publications.asp

Flash: blame the messengers.

Did you see the election last night? The graphics were fabulous - making the complex simple. You only have to watch the football to see it's not always like that (I don't want slow motion replays in a Kai's-power-tool-designed interface - just show me the action.)

Silly title, great article: "The Swiss Army car-truck, Christina Aguilera, and other cases of overdesign" sums it up nicely,

http://www.eCompany.com/articles/mag/0,1640,11627,00.html
(via 37 Signals - http://www.37signals.com/svn/)

"Simply put, overdesign is design for design's sake. It's misplaced fussing, the result of mixed messages -- it's needless design."

Together Flash & sportswear have 'owned' overdesign for the last few years but I've yet to hear critics blaming ugly clothes on the latest fabrics or hi-tec production processes - if only Dupont hadn't invented Lycra!

"You've got compression and streaming - so much more for your bandwidth."

When was the last time you chose the Flash site over HTML version because it was quicker? Nobody likes to wait and there are very few people outside of the creative community who will (unless it involves Pamela Anderson). Face it - 99 times out of 100 I'm still going to 'skip intro' - because it's needless.

"Aaah, but we're not there yet - wait till broadband"

A fast connection won't make me any more likely to look at rubbish. There's plenty of other content to use up bandwidth - streaming video for a start, that will hog even my broadband connection - add a large, animated Flash movie interface and it isnÍt necessarily going to help me watch a film quicker. Good, usable design is not related to access speed - ADSL on it's own wonÍt help a site's usability. Broadband access is a red herring - most heuristics are equally applicable for either narrow or broadband connections - having a fat pipe doesn't automatically make things easy to use.

Macromedia didn't help - calling it 'Flash' was a bit flashy for a start. The irony is that used carefully, it is possible to create a low bandwidth site with Flash that also overcomes some of the limitations of HTML - allowing for streaming content and making the most of vector graphics. Once you've overcome the plug-in angle (over 90%??), and the 'skip-intro' state-of-mind, Flash can be a powerful, usable and accessible application. What it needs are people using it as a tool to meet objectives - 'do because it's necessary' not 'do because It's possible'. Then we can concentrate on blaming the messengers instead of trashing the medium.

On 11:58:54 16 May 2001 Sam wrote:
>To Flash or not to Flash? Where do you stand?
>
>Flash everywhere? Flash sucks? Flash to add value
>selectively? Have your say...
>
>>>>This posting is part of e-consultancy's
>Interactive White Paper entitled 'Content that works'.
>Throughout the paper, there are 18 topical questions like
>this, linked to the e-consultancy forums, where you can
>have your own say on the issues raised.<<<
>
>Click here for more info about the paper and to download
>it for free:
>
>http://www.e-consultancy.com/book/publications.asp