 |
 Travel Website Design: Adobe Flash vs. Mobile Marketing06.07.10 at 9:15 am by Mark ShipleyWhy any tourism marketer would want a website using a technology that keeps a portion of their prospective visitors from being able to view it is beyond me. It's tough right now in the travel industry. Why would anyone try and make it even more difficult to attract business? But alas, there isn’t a day that goes by when I don't run into a destination website that I can’t view on my iPhone - because it uses Flash. The "Let's Talk Colorado" website on my iPhone
Some of the biggest and most respected travel marketing companies continue to use Flash on the sites they build. If they were doctors, this would be considered malpractice. If you are one of their patients, I’d suggest finding a new doctor. A while back, I wrote this post about why I thought travel websites should avoid using Adobe Flash. Over a year has passed, and my position on this subject has not changed. My two biggest complaints back then have yet to be addressed.
And changes in the market since then have reinforced my position. Some may argue that creating smart phone optimized sites without Flash is an acceptable workaround. I would charge that this is merely a band-aid. The right reason for creating smart phone optimized sites is to improve the user experience on smart phones, not to offer a bypass around Flash on non-Flash enabled devices. All the flash, without the FlashToday, there are open source solutions for accomplishing much of the “flash” that makes Flash attractive to designers and their clientele. They’re called HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. This is the next generation of the code that runs the world wide web and are likely to become the next standard. They are efficient, secure, highly reliable and sexy, too. Currently, HTML5 will work on every computer and smart phone using an HTML5 enabled browser, without requiring the user to install applications or plugins. Apple products (including computers, iPhones, iPads and the Safari browser) are already HTML5 enabled. Safari runs HTML5 on Windows machines. According to the HTML5 test website, the following browsers currently have significant support for HTML5:
Only Microsoft is dragging their feet. But both Google and Apple are behind HTML5 and trying to encourage Microsoft to adopt HTML5 in an upcoming version of Internet Explorer. Eventually, once Microsoft joins the HTML5 bandwagon and everyone using outdated browsers upgrade, you won’t have to sacrifice search engine optimization to add a little sizzle to your website for all to see. In the meantime, using Flash on travel websites is just plain foolish. To see HTML5 in action, point your copy of Safari to Apple’s HTML5 demo.
|
 |
Hi Mark,
I own an iPhone and I'm a bit frustrated to not be able to visit flash based web site. That's a fact. But that's an iPhone problem.
Steve Jobs recently wrote: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
We can conclude it's a Apple VS Adobe war. More than 50% of Mac buyers are Adobe Users (Photoshop, Illustror, Flash, Acrobat and much much more). This two companies need each other.
Flash is a platform that allow developer to create applications as good as any iPhone apps. Apple is protecting is proprietary IDE (the software you need to buy to create iPhone app)
You are mentioning two arguments: (not related to iPhone)
1. Search engines can't index flash content at present, and
2. There is currently no way to give someone a link to specific content on a Flash site except the home URL.
Google is able to index Flash content since 2004. Including text, image, button and link.
Please read this article, it's 2 years old:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html
And this one:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=72746#1
Deep linking (URL beyond the home page) is possible as well in Flash application. However it require more work for the developer.
HTML5 could be a Flash killer. We will see. It will take years before developers and CMS (wordpress, drupal, joomla) use it as a standard.
Hope that help.
Regards,
Simon
Simon,
Thanks for your comments. There is an Apple / Adobe war going on and I mentioned it in my post to acknowledge this. But my concerns with Flash as a website medium are not limited to Apple's stance.
It is true that Flash is "technically" indexable Google, however, this is almost useless today if search engine optimization is important to your web content strategy. To illustrate, I have not found a single Flash page (beyond the branded home page) show up in Google search results - ever. That doesn't mean that it's not possible, but from a practical standpoint, it just doesn't happen very often today. This is a big problem for any site that needs to atract visitors who are searching for anything beyond their brand name.
Deep linking is also technically possible, but as you pointed out, it requires more work from the "developer." Again, not a practical solution for an organization that is actively marketing the content they are creating and publishing on a regular basis.
Yes, HTML5 could be a Flash killer, but there are applications where I envision that Flash is a far better solution than HTML5. That just doesn't happen to be website design.