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'Flash: the killer app thats killing the web?' First a bit of web design history : over the past 4- 5 years the web has established itself as a unique medium in itself, as distinct a media as print, radio and television media. It has grown steadily around the medium's strengths - regulary updated content, a unique sense of interactivity, the ability to join and communicate with like-minded people from throughout out the world, personalised information and content. As brands began to reach out on the internet designers created websites dynamic in originality and ideas. Some of the early brands that produced innovative sites included Coke, Absolut and Guinness with regular games, competitions and exciting content. Others produced unique soap opera ideas such as 'The Spot', while interactive entertainment sites such as National Geographic and Discovery.com introduced the best ideas of CD-ROM multimedia but translated them to the new medium of the internet perfectly. These designers, many of them having jumped from the sinking ship of CD-ROM multimedia, had an inherent understanding of the new web medium: the importance of fresh ideas, interesting content, the sense of community and the need for graphics that were quick to download and did not crowd the experience of the website. Companies such as Razorfish.com, Secondstory.com, Agency.com, and many more led the way in interactive design on the web and continue in this today. Today, with the advent of flash, print designers with little or no experience of the legacy or functionality of multimedia or the web, are creating websites that utilise little of the web's strength's but most of its weakness'. Flash 'splash screens' now litter corporate websites, many produced not just to satisfy the designers ego but the companies own marketing brief of impressing the MD. The fact that most users will turn and exit such a site rarely to return, that total flash interfaces cannot be bookmarked, printed, saved or picked up by any search engines does not appear to be relevant to many companies. And the task of updating such animation driven websites is rarely considered. In a recent editorial in The Sunday Business Post a journalist was dumbfounded as to why anyone would visit branded sites such as Tayto.com and others, where the content consists of little more than marketing style flash promo's for products and the ubiquitious product screensaver. Nothing could be more true, as for successful brands to attract attention they cannot loose sight of the importance of both accessibility and exciting content ideas. Recently two key brand websites Coke.com and Ford.com were forced by dissenting users to remove the bulky flash splash screens on their websites. Despite this Coke.com, one of the first brands with a strong interactive presence on the internet has moved away from a dynamic content orientated website to a static flash promo website. Only time will tell how this affects the brands success online. While Flash makes perfect sense when integrated correctly into a website, for interactive entertainment features or explanatory modules, as a interface for a serious marketing brand or E-commerce website it may prove to do more damage than good, until the novelty of animated logo's much like the 'blinktag' wears off. |
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