Just one "plug" for Flash

[Brian Kelsay]

I can understand thedesire to use rich media for those that have the
bandwidth or are willing to wait for some entertaining thing to download,
BUT you mention at the end of your posting "'would people use it' and the
overwhelming answer was 'they will
if they want a job'."   Especially on a career site where people are using
whatever computer is available (library, borrowed time at friends house, old
piece of jusnk that was given to them), why would you want rich media on a
career site given these conditions?   Just as on the KCLUG site where we
want the lowest comman denominator to be able to view our site with any W3C
compliant browser, a job site should want the same thing.   You should
really read the whole Fast Company article that was posted this morning
about Google.  http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/69/google.html
Read what the Google engineers think about load times and how they deal with
ad postings.

I believe that Flash has its place, as does .asp abd .jsp, but I don't want
every site to use that stuff.   A couple of years ago I looked at Hallmark's
web site written in PHP.  I went there to try out sending an e-card.  There
site has a lot of graphics and some Flash and the ENTIRE site used server
side processing.  That site was painfully slow over dial-up and almost as
slow from a corporate LAN.   If you look at their site today, like I did,
they now use a combination of plain HTML, .jsp, Flash on the e-card page
and it looks like some Perl.   If you go so far as I did to look at some of
the source for the pages you see tags like this.  "var flashVersion = 0;  //
boolean. true if it's safe to embed the flash movie in the page" and other
checks to see what they can show the user.   At least they don't make it a
requirement to use Flash or some other wizbang thing to view thier site, but
the experience is still slow.  And as far as I'm concerned ANY site that has
their homepage set to a Flash intro is nuts and if they don't include the
"Skip Intro" button I question whether I really want to view anything
further there.  Here is an example www.aopen.com .   I used to go there for
motherboard info and BIOS upgrades.   One day they had added a Flash movie
to the homepage.   It featured some of their current motherboard models
flying around.  It was sort of annoying as it took a while to load and I
couldn't stop it.   What was even more annoying was the crappy, clunky drum
music that loaded last of all.   It is probably a traditional Chinese or
Tiawanese type of drum/tambourine thing, but it seemed out of place somehow.
We had a good laugh over the music for a good half hour.  Then we saved a
direct link to the motherboard page so we could bypass the flash and clunky
music.  Now go and look at what they have there.
http://www.aopen.com/products/mb/   yet another Flash movie only this one
has a strobe effect that makes me want to throw up.

Just some things to consider in your designs.
Brian

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bradley Miller" <bradmiller at dslonramp.com>

<SNIP>

> with the bath water here on acceptance of Flash.     I believe one study
> was well over 90+% of all web surfers have a Flash player on their system
.
> . . that's hard numbers to dispute if you can provide a value added
product
> to your client.  One of the questions that we wrestled with on this career
> site was "would people use it" and the overwhelming answer was "they will
> if they want a job".
>
>
> Bradley Miller, Owner/Programmer/Designer
> AccessZone Design - www.accesszonedesign.com
> Blue Springs, Missouri
> Phone: 816-228-3814             Fax: 775-254-6162
> Toll-free: 888-872-4420 ICQ: 48555780