Rich and Clever

You’ve seen those sites before. It starts off with a bunch of different text and pictures fading in and out or flying in all directions. There may even be loud music suddenly playing that you didn’t expect or ask for. You quickly look for the “Skip Intro” button tucked away in the bottom corner. The different elements come together and form a somewhat intelligible design. You’re on an all-Flash website.

You look around and you find a cool page on the site you want to bookmark, but the URL has never changed. There’s only one link for the entire website, rather that each page having its own. You want to copy contact information, but you can’t, because in an all-Flash site it isn’t text, but an image. At this point you probably realize printing something is a bad idea, because if you do you’ll get absolutely nothing.

So many sites are created with nothing but Flash, and we have only Flash designers to blame.

Let me make one thing clear: Flash is great. It can go a long way to dress up a basic site, and add really interesting interactivity to a static page. It’s a great design tool to have. But that’s all it is: a tool for design.

When you create a site with nothing but Flash, flash is all you get. You don’t get a site with content that is easy to find and use, pages that are easy to navigate and come back to later. You don’t even get something for search engines to read; they just see a blank page. You get something flashy. But the fact is, you can have both. Flash can be integrated with more traditional web design standards to create beautiful sites that are accessible as well.

If you have an all-Flash website, then don’t take my remarks offensively. As a website owner, it is your designer’s job to recommend the best actions for your company to take when creating an online identity. And in an industry with several different methods for accessing the internet (computers, cell phones, etc), several different types of people who access it (you and me, those who browse without flash, the disabled who use screen readers and other assistive technologies), using bleeding-edge Flash techniques to create an entire website is rarely ever a good choice.

Firefox is a free, open source web browser made by the Mozilla corporation. On Windows computers it is second only to Internet Explorer in popularity, but most people have never heard of it or tried it. If you’re reading this article on Internet Explorer, I suggest you give it a shot.

As a web designer I have a special love for Firefox, because it is standards-based, meaning that all the rules that have been created for how a web browser should interpret different codes are followed very closely. Because of that I am able to do things for a website in Firefox that I could never accomplish in Internet Explorer (even the most recent version, 7). In fact, in almost every website I build I have to create backup rules just for IE so it’ll do what I need it to.

But Firefox isn’t just good for us dorky few that spend all day on a computer. It is very fast, much safer than Internet Explorer, and comes with hundreds of add-ons to improve your experience, like music players, tool for speeding up your connection, and tons of themes to personalize the look of Firefox.

To learn more about people who have made the switch to a safer, better browser, visit Browse Happy, or just get over to Firefox and try it out.