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Whether you\u2019re in the web design industry or not, you probably noticed that Flash-based websites \u2013 the ones with the extensive layouts, sounds, and opening animations \u2013 all but disappeared a number of years ago. They didn\u2019t quite go extinct, but they certainly went out of style in a hurry.<\/p>\n
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The question, then, is what killed Flash in web design? Let\u2019s dig into the answers\u2026<\/p>\n
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Probably the biggest issue with designing websites in Flash was that they looked cool (or so a lot of us thought), but had to be coded in a way that set up content as visuals instead of text. That might not seem like a bad thing when you consider that most users prefer images over writing, but having a layout that was entirely image-based was bad for search visibility.<\/p>\n
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Google\u2019s search spiders can understand text very easily. Images are tougher to decipher and make sense of, though. So, having your website created with Flash meant you weren\u2019t likely to get a lot of search traffic, and that\u2019s not something most businesses could do without.<\/p>\n
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One unfortunate byproduct of human nature is that anything that seems novel, creative, or popular is likely to be overused to the point that people hate it. That certainly turned out being the case with Flash website intros.<\/p>\n
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At first, watching an animation load up was engaging. Then, it seemed like designers were having contests to see whether they could outdo one another and impress buyers with new combinations of images, motion, and music. Finally, though, we arrived at a point where there were so many different Flash animations online that people just wanted to skip through them and get to the real content.<\/p>\n
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In that way, the popularity of Flash led to its own demise.<\/p>\n
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One other disadvantage to Flash as a design tool tends to be overlooked. Namely, that the underlying software had to be patched and updated pretty regularly for it to remain stable and secure.<\/p>\n
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If someone with the website didn\u2019t have the latest version of the application \u2013 or if the web visitor hadn\u2019t bothered to install the latest update \u2013 there was a chance the page wouldn\u2019t load, or that it could be infected with viruses and malware. That was bad for business, and something customers grew to hate.<\/p>\n
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In the end, the story of Flash is typical of a lot of web technologies. It was fun and interesting at first, but it soon became apparent that there weren\u2019t a lot of real uses once the initial sense of fun wore off. The real lesson learned wasn\u2019t just to skip Flash on your website, but to carefully weigh the pros and cons of any particular tool or application before deciding you needed it to help your business grow.<\/p>\n
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Whether you\u2019re in the web design industry or not, you probably noticed that Flash-based websites \u2013 the ones with the extensive layouts, sounds, and opening animations \u2013 all but disappeared a number of years ago. They didn\u2019t quite go extinct, but they certainly went out of style in a hurry. The question, then, is what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1098,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n