Has Flash over-stayed it's welcome?
As many great website design experts would tell you, one of the main challenges of the modern Internet is to not only ensure that people can find your website using search engines, but also decide, not just to hit the back button in their browser of choice, but to make the bold decision to peruse the fruits of your site.
There’s no doubt that elements of flash animation, no matter how simple, can act as a great way to capture the attention of your visitors. The world of website design has often favoured these elements in order to give your homepage that little bit more.
To Flash, or Not to Flash
Not so long ago, we were faced with the debate of whether websites completely built in flash were ever going to drive the potential traffic and conversions to ensure maximum profitability, thus begins the slow descent of the web’s most exciting child.
Once again, Adobe’s Flash, finds itself begrudgingly under the spotlight and once again, for the wrong reasons. With Apple’s much publicised drubbing of the platform in recent months, people are considering more than ever whether or not to ditch it forever, well it least while it’s not supported on the iPhone.
The JQuery Alternative
I will be looking at ways in which we can replace many common slideshow effects of flash within our website design, using the ever popular and robust JQuery platform, along with CrossSlide.
- The Simple Fade – This very understated effect is often the weapon of choice for providing subtle yet visually appealing movement of images.
- The Moving Fade – Coupling the above with sliding images.
- The Zooming Fade – A further variation with added Zoom.
Try it for yourself…
Examples of each of the the above can be found at http://tobia.github.com/CrossSlide/, along with the required code to try them for yourself.
Flash will certainly have it’s place for a while yet, but unless you are using complex animations, then I’d recommend you at least consider making the switch.
Further more, when it comes to editing slides or images within a JQuery alternative, it’s often as simple as changing a file name, not recompiling a SWF file. Need I say more?
A compromise would be to use something like http://www.awesomeanimator.com This lets you design a site which can be published either as Flash (SWF) or as HTML5+javascript. i.e. create some buttons on the page and add links to them then when you publish it you can choose either SWF or HTML5 as an output. This way, you will have two versions one Flash for IE for example and another one for Safari and iPad.