Animated sites that don’t need flash
Why use flash?
Many sites choose to use flash as they wish to present some kind of animation on their website, usually in the navigation. This in its self is fine, but you do run the risk of not having an accessible site that has no good SEO. Depending on how your developer coded the flash site, it may be in the position where the search engine cannot read any of the text on your site, or that a disabled person cannot navigate your screen as there are no element to move to.
We are often employed to work along side a flash developer to create a HTML version of the same page(s), animating it where possible to look like the flash site
Mobile phones and other browsers often don’t have flash
New browsers such as mobile phones often do not support flash at all, leaving your site un-accessible to them. Some smaller browsers do not support images or javascript also, so a path of graceful degradtion must be chosen.
Graceful degradation
Graceful degradation is the process by which the programmer makes the site degrade when being viewed on a lesser capable browser
- No images: have good alt text when using the img tag, and place all other images via CSS
- No javascript: use the <noscript> element to hold a pure html version of the information
- No flash: use prototype and scriptaculous to animate html tags
- No CSS: use semantic xHTML to give a strong layout
Death to the loading splash screen
We hate having to wait for the flash loading page to get to 100%. To us it shows a site that was designed circa. 1999. Out of date and way behind in technology. Flash should (in our opinion) only be used to show off a part of a screen such as an advert, or to create a virtual world. However these should still root themselves in HTML to make it a great site
