Flashturbation causes blindness
September 5th, 2007 • Posted by Seth Gardenswartz • Permalink
Flash makes for a lonely site. This is not some old wives' tale but a not-so-well-kept secret regarding website design. "Flashturbation" is defined by James Lewin as "the inappropriate use of new Internet technologies, especially Macromedia Flash." It is similar to masturbation in that its main function is self gratification (often on the part of the website designer). Too often folks hire a web designer who promises a "flashy" custom site for 3-5 thousand dollars. Then they proceed to stroke their own egos (and yours) by creating something a slick-looking, slow and almost unusable website. Then they bill you for thousands, submit the work for artsy recognition and possibly win an award for creative use of media, while your site sits unvisited and giving you no love. Sound good to you? If so, you are just the sucker some web designers are looking for.
Flash make your site invisible. I know you don't want to believe me. Flashturbation feels good and you can do it without a partner (called "visitors" or "users" in web speak). If you flashturbate too much you will have to find fulfillment on your own because no one will find your URL, make appointments or purchases from your spa website. The blindness in this case afflicts not the flashturbating website site, but rather those innocent customers that might be searching for it. This is because "Flash" is virtually unreadable by search engines. If your home page is 100% Flash (and I know many spas who have paid handsomely for that privilege) Google can't read any of the content on that page. Imagine a blind person trying to read a photograph of a Braille document. That is roughly the same experience a search engine has when it tries to read your Flash-based website. Since they can't read your Flash content, Google, Yahoo, MSN and all the other search engines will push you down, and possibly off, the first page of results for a particular search. This is a big problem since over 60 million Americans find websites using search engines every day. If you load your tricked-out Flash page for your friends they may say "Cool" or "that's a pretty website" but a potential new client looking for "spa gift" in "your town" will never see your fancy site. Furthermore, if someone does stumble on your site, too much Flash will make your potential customer's "visit" a painful experience.
Who are you trying to satisfy? Your website is not an excuse for a designer to show off his creativity at your expense. Neither is it a snazzy billboard that makes people think your business is something that you are not. Your website should work for your users and it should MAKE MONEY, not cost money as so many do. Your site should be easy to find (if your site fails at find-ability nothing else matters) and, easy to navigate. If not your site is just Flashturbating, by itself.
How to stop Flashturbating. The solution is to build (and maintain) a nice clean site that loads quickly, with an intuitive layout, lots of relevant text and easy navigation. Take the Google site, for example. You think they can't afford a fancy flash-filled website? Google knows that folks will use their site if it does what the user expects, quickly and efficiently. Your spa website can still be pretty, and even use a little Flash for effect. But ask yourself who you are trying to please. If the answer is your visitors/customers then lay off the Flash. If you are only trying to please yourself, Flashturbate to your heart's content.
P.S. If you would like to see some examples of nice, effective spa websites check out our Dynamic Websites or give one of our web design partners a call.
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September 7th, 2007 at 7:43 am
You are so right!
My husband demanded that he be allowed to design and build our website www.esspa.com. From the beginning he said he wanted to design a site for the LCD (lowest common denomiator) user with a potential dial-up connection. What we ended up with is a 600+ page site that has every possible piece of information about our spa, our products and what we do. It has no flash, some pictures (all optimized for fast loading), and some dynamic html codes. Do other sites look cooler? You bet. Do other sites get as much traffic? Not a chance. ESSPA.com averages 200 unique visitors per day (over 1000 page views per day) and brings in more than $5,000 in direct internet sales per month. And best of all, ESSPA.com can be found in the NATURAL search listings for a host of keywords that are relevant to our location and services. We have web designers tell us all the time how terrible our site is but not a day goes by that a customer tells us how great it is. Who do you think we should listen to? If we hadn't done our own before SpaBoom showed up we might have used their Dynamic Websites, but my advice is to build a site based on your end user. And if you want some help, let us know. Good luck.
April 25th, 2008 at 11:35 am
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