Obsessive Flash Intro Pages
During the building of Q8Ba7th direcotory of Kuwaiti sites, I have noticed an enormous number of sites using Flash as their intro page, with or without a real good reason. Flash is just used because it looks cool. People don’t take in mind what message they want to convey to their users, or what their users really want from visiting the site. Many government sites have even some long and heavy flashy intro pages, and the misery rise when there is no link to bypass it. Flash is a real cool technology to insert animation and present demos online. But intro pages were just cool the old days, and no one will visit your site back for some fancy flash you made (or taken from somewhere else). When designing a site, there are many things to keep into consideration, and Flash intro pages should be avoided in most cases for the following reasons:
- Load time: Flash sites take long to load, wasting user time and bandwidth.
- Bad Experience: The faster and easier I can make use of site visit, the more I am likely to visit it again.
- SEO Effect: Flash components are non-indexable by search engines. A front page is the first page a search engine usually sees, and if that page has no indexable content, then the search engine may not bother (or be able) to index the rest of the site. It’s kind of locking the front door from visitors. Ofcourse, search results are one of the great free ways to generate huge amount of traffic, and leaving that portion of traffic means you have to rely on ads and word of mouth mostly.
- Flash Support: This is a very low rate I know, but still some browsers and users don’t have Flash running, and you would be denying them access to your site.
- Meaningless: Very often, the Flash is simply a moving animation of site name and some text, not sending any message to the visitor. A government does not need promotion it self at all. It’s an official site. One of a kind in each country. Zero competition. Just deliver the content and services the user want. He will come back trust me on that one.
Some may argue they really really need a Flash intro site, or their whole site is Flash based. What to do in that case?
- Have some meaningful title and meta content on the intro page.
- Always always have a text based Skip Intro link. Leave it outside the Flash. That way, you are giving the customer a quick way to skip the Flash and go inside the site, not having to wait for any Flash load. And, you are also giving search engines an entrance point to the rest of your site, making it indexable.
- Try to deliver some side content around the Flash as well. See Snap for instance.
- Provide Flash Alternative: If Flash is not supported, provide text based version of the site.
- Flash size: Be considerant to the Flash size as this is the first page the visitor sees, and if it takes long, it may be his last. If you can’t avoid large Flash size, then be sure to have progressive loading. Give something to the user as long as it’s ready. This makes the loading transient for him.
- Modifiable: Many Flash are just designed or one time and no thought of future modification was ever made. If there is a slight chance this would need to change in the future, try to accommodate for it ahead of time.
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Comments
Kroms: Well the design is quite impressive, but I resist to browse the whole site because of the excessive load time.
Great topic! Something I’ve always had in mind but never thought of writing about. Your points are spot on, and yet I still know web developers who know about them but continue to use flash for their entire site design. :/
3baid: Thanks. Yeah, some argue they can overcome it with some workarounds, or tend to think catchy flash will cover up. But still, never in ministry site :(
More importantly, why would anyone want to put Flash on their government websites? What about the Average Joe who’s internet barely holds-up a .bmp file? :S
Only reasons to have Flash is when you make it (http://www.2advanced.com/ – it’s delicious) or when your target customer has enough money for a high-speed internet connection, like a DJ website or something.