Ramsay Mameesh

Want Flash on your website? Flying text and on demand video. Supercharged banner ads. These are a few of the wonderful aspects of flash design.

But wait, before you go shelling out big bucks, to change your boring web 1.0 site into a flash centric site, answer these questions first.

Does your target audience earn more than a $100,000 per year?

Does your target audience live in cities or in Iceland?

If you didn’t answer with a resounding YES!, then wait. Because if you forget about the “three second rule”, where you have three seconds to impress your visitor before they take off (a nice little paper on the subject can be seen here), then your expensive flash site, besides costing a ton of money, may hurt your sales.

An article by Mike Lazarus in the San Francisco Chronicle, presents findings from a study on broadband penetration, done by the Public Policy Institute of California. According to the study:

“The Public Policy Institute of California issued a report last week in which it found that 47 percent of all households statewide had broadband Internet access as of 2005. Nationally, the figure is closer to 40 percent.

That’s partly a factor of geography — broadband is available to more urban dwellers than people in rural communities. But it’s also a factor of wealth.

Sixty-eight percent of California households with incomes greater than $100,000 have broadband Internet access, the institute found. That percentage drops to 49 percent for households with incomes between $50,000 and $75,000 and to 24 percent for households earnings less than $25,000.”

Macromedia Flash gives website designers the ability to create truly cool websites and annoying banner ads. But unless you have high speed internet it can be very slow to download and can cause browsers to freeze or crash.

It’s been around for a few years, but only recently has it become the “hottest thing” in web design, a quick look at the job boards show that everyone wants to hire flash designers. Why?

Three main reasons:

Adobe bought Macromedia in mid 2005, and has done a good job of getting their flash plug-in onto peoples computers. Adobe claims that 98.7% of browsers in use have the plug-in installed. This means pretty much everyone can view your flash banner ad. To run flash on your computer you need to have the plug-in installed.

The number of people able to adequately access a Flash site is greater than the study done by PPIC suggests. The study was done in 2005 this is 2007. And many people do their web surfing at work, where they have access to high speed internet, not at home.

Advertising agencies and web design firms can charge their customers a lot more to create a flash site. Flash is a heavy, complicated, and specialized program. It takes quite a while to learn and also takes a lot longer to design. Hours rack up when designing a flash site and guess who pays?

So unless Are you ready to shell out big bucks to have the coolest website in your industry, your audience is a rich city dweller, or you just want to impress your competitor’s CEO in the next office tower wait. How long? Six months to a year. You have three seconds to impress your audience. What percentage of your audience are you willing to lose?