Speaking of Clover.

The Lowdown on Flash

Once or twice since we launched, we’ve had someone tell us that they are wary of using Flash for their entire site. We know that there are some different perspectives out there, but sometimes technology changes faster than people’s minds, so this post is dedicated to debunking some outdated myths about Flash.

Part of the problem is that when Flash first came on the scene, it wasn’t especially sophisticated and some web design folks wrote it off as simply a tool to create “shoot the monkey” banner ads. Since then it’s blossomed into a beautiful and elegant tool with a fully-fledged programming language as powerful as anything else out there.

Chances are, you’re probably not worried about Flash at all – but if you’re someone that lays awake at night pondering the differences between current web design technologies, then by all means read on!

We’ll start with some possible questions about using Flash for your entire website:

Q: Doesn’t Flash load slowly?
A: Usually the way people design flash sites makes them load every page on your site at once. This sometimes gives a slow load time up front, but then makes it quick to browse through every other page. Clover, by the way, is special… It loads only what it needs to at any given point. And since everything you do gets optimized by The Greenhouse, it loads extremely quickly. (You’ll notice that none of our sites have loading bars, because they don’t need them!)

Q: Will my site show up on everyone’s computers?
A: Way back in the day it was a legitimate concern that not everyone had Flash installed on their computers. Now there’s only a tiny fraction of people who don’t have Flash (usually unfortunate people with the type of IT guy who won’t let you install Firefox because he’s scared of it).

Q: Can I bookmark a page or hit the back button?
A: This is still the one true limitation with Flash. Because all of your pages are technically loaded within one Flash “movie”, your browser doesn’t know when you flip between pages. There are some good alternatives for bookmarking a page (like the way Google Maps has the ‘link to this page’ button), and we may do this for Clover in the future. But even without this feature, it’s probably not a big deal for a typical church or ministry website.

Q: Can I still gather statistics on my visitors?
A: Yes and yes! The simplest option is just to track all the people that come to your site; you can’t see what pages they went to, but at least you have some rough numbers. But now there’s an even better solution… With Google Analytics, there’s a special way of tracking each page view within a Flash site! This gives you the robust stats that you’d expect from a powerhouse statistics software package. We’ll be adding this feature in the near future as well. (UPDATE: This has been a feature of Clover for a long time now…  and it’s incredibly easy to set up.  Read about Clover’s web stats feature here).

Q: Won’t my site be invisible to search engines?
A: Normally with Flash, you’d have very limited ability for search engine optimization. However, the brilliant (and humble) minds at Clover have created a special system that makes every word you type show up to all search engines. It even shows multiple pages as they’re supposed to be organized, and optimizes everything for the best possible search results. If you’re interested in reading more about this, check out this post.

Ok, now let’s move on to some of the benefits that only Flash allows:

Embedding fonts – Without Flash, you’re limited to five basic fonts! (Have you ever noticed that almost all website fonts look exactly the same?)

Animation – Flash gives designers the power to smoothly animate anything. Even if you’re a “buttoned-down” type rather than a “creative” type, subtle animation gives a richness and a polish that you can’t deny.

Detailed control of properties like rotation, opacity, etc – If you’re not a designer, you’ve probably never thought about this, but trust me, it’s like sculpting with modeler’s clay after you’ve been forced to use play-doh for the past six years. It also allows tons of things (like this and this) that aren’t possible any other way.

Sophisticated layout and resizing – Let’s see, what’s the best metaphor I can think of for this? Aw heck, why don’t you just check out this site and consider what it would look like if you couldn’t control the size of anything.

Real time loading without refreshing the page – In recent years, a technology called AJAX has become popular for doing this same thing. It makes it possible to do all sorts of advanced stuff – anything from sorting a big table of data quickly to writing emails on an interface like Gmail. Both AJAX and Flash are great for this.

Best compatibility for playing video – There are lots of ways to embed video, but recently Flash has become the standard because it is the most compatible and gives developers the most power to customize video players (and it also has great compression quality). Youtube and most other major video sites use Flash for all their video players.

Unlimited creativity - We don’t mean to sound cheesy, but Flash is so creatively powerful that it is stunning sometimes. Don’t take our word for it, check out a few of the literally millions of amazing flash sites on the web:

www.szomo.ca
www.flight404.com/version7/
www.billyharveymusic.com
www.thibaud.be
www.adelicious.ch/en
www.tokyoplastic.com
www.leoburnett.ca
www.itlooksgood.com
www.driveconference.com

Ok, just for the record, we do recognize that Flash is not the end-all-be-all web design tool. There are still plenty of situations where other technologies make sense, and we have lots of respect for all the xhtml/css/javascript/php developers out there. We just want to make sure that Flash doesn’t get relegated to that “shoot the monkey” thing anymore.

Hopefully you’ll sleep soundly tonight knowing that your Clover website is built on solid technology that fills its role perfectly.

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If you’d like to keep dwelling on this topic, check out Jim’s post about design standards, (and soon, our upcoming post about our new philosophy on social networking).

 

 

Posted on July 24th, 2008 under Randomisms by Ben with 2 comments.