THIS NEW FANGLED THING CALLED THE INTERNET

The days of a whiz-bang website with lots of sound and motion and annoyance is coming to an end. Sure these types of sites will still exist sometimes, but they will be nothing more than a digital online brochure. In our new web world people are thirsty for content - more web-users now use Google to look up a phone number than
actually picking up the Yellow Pages.

No people these days want something that they can go to to find information that’s constantly updated. If you have some flash site out there that someone has seen before, chances are they aren’t coming back to the site unless it’s to show a buddy.
Look at the most popular sites online - Drudge Report, MySpace, YouTube
- these are sites that have users who are constantly updating material all the time.

I think that people will still use Flash a little, just maybe not for web. Heck, I think that the entire iTunes program is Flash based, but it is better suited for that type of
software in my opinion. It’s more software friendly than web friendly. Here’s where these 2 thoughts meet. Flash is not searchable content for the web. More people type in a company name in Google to find the site than actually typing in the company’s URL. If you have a Flash based site it will not show up in Google when search because there is no readable web content, only an uploaded Flash file.

In a nutshell what I am saying is that if you have a Flash site, you need an HTML or XML site - period. If you’re a smaller company who is looking for a smaller website where you are just looking to have a nice design and content that does not need to be updated frequently I would just stick with good ol’ fashioned HTML. It’s easy to update on a small scale and it’s easily searchable when looked for through a search engine. If you’re larger company I would strongly suggest a content heavy site thats easily updated with a Content Management System (or CMS). Just log-in and change away.

Oh, not to pitch myself or my company (but it’s my blog so I will) I can work with you to set up any of the above mentioned content. 

Tim Dozier ~ Senior Designer at Hummingbird Ideas (hbirdideas.com)