The FundHome pages can have flash based interactive elements that DON’T force users to wait through long download times. League of Great ExplorersFlash is a very good tool for creating online games. Put Theory Into PracticeFlash can be used for developing training and learning tools. The Fund’s Venture Capital ModelMini-presentations and explanation of advanced concepts often work well with animation tools like flash. Videos That Mean BusinessFlash video presents a low barrier to entry for most users. FlashWhat is it Good For?March 14, 2008
Not to make a bad pun from the band “War”, but what is Flash good for? Serious developers would quickly respond with absolutely nothing. While we tend to agree with them for the most part, there are reasons to use flash and there are reasons not to use it. It’s important to be careful and select when, and when not, to use it wisely. If you know your target audience and what the sites primary and secondary goals are, this decision can be made much easier. Here, we provide a list of only some of the good and bad uses of Flash. More points and consideration will come at a later date, so be on the look out for our next Flash article if you find this one to be beneficial.
Videos: Good
Search Engines: Bad Adobe doesn't use Flash (a product created by Adobe) to build there entire site and structure. It's a garnish used on the home page. Still, to this day, the most powerful and single most important search engine secret is content; open, readable, well written, concise, fresh, current, and updated content. Think of Google and Yahoo as snobby food critics who only eat only the freshest, most popular, and most accessible content. A food critic doesn't want to wait in line to be seated. If that’s the case they might leave just like a search engine spider would do with a flash site that has locked up content.
Bookmarking Pages: Bad This causes multiple levels of time consumption on both ends of the spectrum. It causes the “discoverer” of the internal page to describe their trail and retrace their steps. And in turn the recipient of the link will also have to spend time following these directions. All of this, just to get to an internal web page that had already been found successfully. Many times this causes so much frustration that people choose to ignore the flash site altogether and search for another site to reference.
Cool Graphical Elements: Neutral Also, while special effects and movable objects create a sense of energy, they can often detract the user from the information they intended to find on the site.
Printing: Bad There is no simple way to print from a flash site.
Copy & Paste: Bad
Back Button: Bad
Device Independence: Bad PC World reported, "Jobs was quick to say that Adobe's Flash player for mobile platforms, the Flash Lite Player, isn't advanced enough for use on the iPhone. He continued to say that "proper" Flash "performs too slow to be useful," on the iPhone, which leads me to believe Flash on the iPhone was at least tested." On March 6th Apple released the beta iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK), and the developer community issued their support. PC World again reported, "Apple has confirmed that over 100,000 iPhone developers have downloaded the beta SDK". With the new launch of the iPhone SDK, and with the iPhone leading mobile handset Google searches, it doesn't look like Flash is going to be supported by mobile devices any time soon.
Cost: Bad
Ease of Adding New Content: Bad
More to Come: | ||
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