Boy I’d like to have the budget some golf sites seem to have for hiring flash programmers. Flash is that really fancy program for displaying web graphics and animation you see on sites like TaylorMadeGolf.com, Titleist.com and BenHogan.com.
Now those three sites I picked because they’re all great brands and sites AND their flash loads pretty fast. I have a pretty fast internet connection and TM’s site loads in about 10 seconds, Titleist’s in about 5.
The problem
The problem I have with some sites is they’re throwing in too many bells and whistles and leaving out the meat and potatoes. Well the meat and potatoes may be there, they are just too hard to find or take too long to get there.
A good example of flash overkill is Erica Blasenberg’s site. She’s cute and the design of her site is very cool, fine. BUT the damn site with all it’s fancy animation, color changes and other somewhat senseless bells and whistles takes a whopping 1 minute and 21 seconds on my fast internet connection to load. That’s 1:21 before I get to a “main menu” or main page where I can select content. If you want to view her site, start it loading and run out an pick up lunch. When you get back it will be ready to go.
Like I said, I have a fast connection. If you are on a dial up connection Erica’s site could take 5-10 minutes to load. Who wants to wait that long? She’s not THAT cute. 🙂
From her main page it’s another whopping 45 seconds for the fancy animations to cease and for her photo gallery to appear.
Erica’s site is the equivalent to a 6 hour round of golf on a nice course.
SEO
“SEO” stands for “search engine optimization” and flash is a bad thing when it comes to that. The search bots (google, yahoo etc) can’t read the content inside flash movies. Google’s bot won’t see all your great content if your whole site is a flash movie and therefore you may not get a high search ranking.
Of course TM and Titleist have very high ratings anyway because they’re big companies. But smaller sites may run into problems.
The rant comes to an end, for now
Give me some content and ease off on the fancy animations. They look cool but they’re a waste of time and bandwidth.
HOGWire – Golf Industry News
A good extension to use is Flashblock, which does a really good job of blocking Flash animations. And it’s easy to re-enable the ones you want.
Assuming you’re using Firefox, of course. 🙂
flash = bad.
might as well make a non-flash site and get some search engine traffic. it makes you more money :).
that is exactly why I made the decision early on to stick with HTML. It loads faster, is searched easier and you don’t need a superfast connection to surf it.
Natalie has the same problem. Most of these girls are not hands on. They have agents/firms that higher big “designers from ad shops” to do their site; so they don’t really understand what flash is, or what HTML is.
Can’t have somebody else putt for you…if you want to sink them