Please wait… Loading…

I’ve been on a lot of Flash-only sites lately, and I continue to be annoyed at the experience. After typing the URL, I get “Please Wait…” or the even-less-polite “Loading content.” Now, I haven’t even seen a logo or anything yet, so I have no idea if the wait will be worth my while — or even if I’m heading to the right page (my fat fingers mistype URLs all the time).

As a user, if I know that a) I’m in the right place and b) the content will be worthwhile, I don’t mind waiting up to 30 seconds for something to download. But if it’s just a Home Page, and I don’t know whether it’ll be worth it, I’m moving on.

Some of these recent offenders have included Web sites for large interactive agencies (who, frankly, ought to know better). I gather the idea is let’s use the site to show off our multimedia skills. But if the potential client browses away before ever seeing all that rich content, it’s a loss.

I’m all for rich media, and I’ve seen some pretty creative stuff recently. But if you’re designing Flash-only sites, you’d better get the first screen up in a blink, then load the heavy stuff behind the scenes. Better yet, load some simple wrapper HTML, then place the Flash media inside that.

2 Comments

  1. Brian
    February 21, 2006

    Followup: I was just on a Flash site that has a lot of text in a column. I use my mouse scroll wheel whenever I get to a page with a lot of content, because I don’t have to move at all to start scrolling. But…

    This Flash page doesn’t work that way (and many other Flash pages, including Macromedia’s). In order to scroll, I have to click on the designer-created scroll bar.

    Possible? Sure. Annoying? Yes.

  2. Me !
    February 28, 2006

    … I don’t install the Flash player — the result is firefox putting up a little complaint-bar “Hey ! What kind of regressive are ya !!?! Get Flash !” which I close and go on about my business. If the page is nothing but Flash then it gets ctrl+W.

    Of course I only load images from the originating site, so I rarely see what web designers intend …

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