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.
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.
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 …