Yo, Webmasters... Ever Hear of Customers?

Professor Mike brought up "web analytics Wednesday" last week on Pittsblog.  Although we were out of town and couldn't participate, we'd like to add something to the conversation:

We will typically not do business with vendors who use only Flash on their websites.

Really, all-Flash sites are a royal pain.  We were just doing some research for a new product and came across a site that had a product that might have interested us except for the demands their website made on our connection, software and hardware. 

If you're expecting us to download Flash 8.0 to view the content on your site, it tells us you're not customer-centric, so it's not going to be a good marriage.

Comments

[frosty]

I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment, even though I have a few (art-centric) things out there that use too much flash. Live and learn.

However, I'd like to also point out that customer-friendly websites aren't simply a matter of avoiding flash.

As more and more people use modern browsers like Firefox, one should also take "power users" into consideration when making a good site. Because the more the web progresses, the more "power users" blend into simply "clueful users."

Case in point: this very blog uses links that have both standard hrefs and redundant onclick handlers.

Why, you ask, is that bad? It's bad because a lot of us middle-click/command-click on links so they open in new tabs. When you have the onclick to redundantly handle the link, the result is that we get our new tab but *also* get the link opened in the current window, or in a new one. (It's also "broken" from a technical perspective, but that's somewhat beside the point.)

I realize that's most likely a TypePad thing and not something you've done on purpose, which is why I'm commenting on it here.

Just as you should avoid the scourge of too much Flash, you should also demand your blog-service povider work to make your readers' experience a good one. On preview: that goes double for the preview page. ;-)

(Love the blog, by the way, and linked in from GapingVoid. If you're in San Francisco check out Ritual Coffee.)

[Rich]

Frosty,
Thanks for the comments and the heads-up. We've had Firefox since late beta (v0.9) but honestly haven't used it nearly as much as IE for reasons of convenience more than anything technically defensible (not to mention IE just stomps all over it).

I wasn't aware of the issues you bring up although they certainly make complete sense. We are looking at moving this blog over to Wordpress in the not-too-distant future, which I think will address those issues (hopefully - if it's not built into WP, then we're not going to get to it right away).

And to tell the real truth, not all 100% Flash are horrible. Just 99% of them. When we want to find things quickly, we just want to click through to the info. Generally speaking, Flash sites don't let us do that. They're not set up to be outward-focused to the customer, they're too often inward-focused on the company.

And the day I posted that was a particularly bad day. Then we find out Stumptown is 100% Flash...

We met Gabriel from Ritual at the SCAAs last week. He competed. Nice guy and tres talented.