Ideas on getting results.

Over the years, we’ve created some pretty hot flash sites. Heck, just last year, we redesigned and relaunched a beautiful portfolio site for our pals at LuckeYou — an awesome broadcast and animation production studio in New York. While flash sites can work well for creative firms to show off their creativity, they aren’t the best route for small businesses who are trying to expand their reach and visibility online. More and more, we are standing firm on our belief that a site that is fully enclosed in Flash is not a smart solution in the long term. Thankfully, we now have a terrific rant from Steve Jobs himself, a plain-speak explanation as to why Apple has avoided integrating flash into their devices. And hey, why wouldn’t you want to apply the same strategic thinking that one of the world’s most successful brands employs?

This is not to say that there can be no Flash at all in your online presence. Key site elements like navigation can be SO much more engaging with Flash. And cross-browser issues (like your site not displaying on an iPhone) CAN be eliminated by creating a Flash-alternate version. But that means that the dev team has to do additional work in developing the “fix”. Now, as Steve Jobs eloquently explained, as HTML technologies advance, there are new options for navigation and animation, like jQuery and Ajax whereby menus can animate, dropdown, and unveil in a way that mimics flash transitions. As we see it, those of us who embrace the open source technologies benefit from the huge amount of resources available whereas those who stick with proprietary software (like Adobe’s Flash) are going to rely on Flash to keep up with the times…which means recoding flash videos and rebuilding the Flash pieces to “work” with web platforms that are continually being tweaked.

With all this said, Juicy Results will continue to integrate Flash into web experiences where appropriate. But you can bet that our focus remains on creating web experiences that work on as many browsers/systems as possible and require the smallest amount of upkeep and maintenance as our clients move their businesses forward.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 11:07 am and is filed under Strategic Advice, Tools + Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.