For a long time now, my sites have been catching people’s eye. The most common feedback I get about them is that they are visually appealing. This is a very strong point in my view. A picture says a thousand words and people are happy to look at it, while they are not willing to read a thousand words. Going by that theory, some of my sites are presenting more than 300,000 words about their product and they are being read every day. People love my flash sites and they climb steadily in the search ranks for that precise reason.

Because of the growing pressure from the ipad market, I have been doing some reserach and devolpment about how we can best present our sites without Flash. We don’t want to forfeit the visual impact and emotional motivation that a well presented site holds. Some sites designed for mobile devices, actually just present a text-only version of their content. I think this is very poor marketting. People don’t make consumer choices based on information. They make those choices based on emotion.

I have developed a non-flash engine (still refining it) that uses javascript and jquery to present a non-scalable version of my sites. It replicates the flash version in many ways and yet still has a few restrictions. I would like to outline the features of this method here.

On the positive side:

• The site is the same content. All of the content shown on your non-flash version is drawn frome the same sources. This is very important. When you update your information in one place, via the regular text editor I provide, it is updated accross devices. The same text and images (and menu for those using the new databse driven menu config) appear on both. So there is no new content just a different program presenting the same content. Great!
• The site knows what device is viewing it. The first thing determined is whether the device has flash installed. Next the agent code is extracted from the browser of the device so we know whether it is an iphone, a pc, an android phone, an ipad, whatever. Then a respective “style-sheet” is loaded to help that device know just how we want the site layed out. So far this is tested on ios devices (iphone, ipad), pc and android devices.
• Smooth photo slideshow. Whether you know it or not, those large images that dominate your site are selling for you – guaranteed. I have utilised a javascript application to achieve almost the same result on non-flash devices. You can see it in the example.
• All on one page. We still have no need to scroll down. This is not a long columnar blog-style site where scrolling down removes you from the land of colour and emotion and leaves you in the wasteland of dry blank ink on white screen. The site is all contained within the one “frame” just like the flash version.
• Touch friendly. The site can be zoomed in and panned around using your finger on touch devices. In addition, the scrolling of text within a text box is by the same method, just drag it up or down with your finger. No need to tap tap tap on the down arrow.
• No change for search engine friendliness. All text is loaded at the start, but hidden from the viewer until requested. Research has shown that Google doesn’t mind this at all as long as the info can be found by the viewer by one method or another – so the result is complete text indexing. great again!
• For those of you who have back end photo organisers, text editors, comment editors and so on, there is no change required either to these engines or to your data. It all stays the same. the same content, the same database, the same folders of images, video and etc.

On the negative side:

• No resize. The site will fit inside a large screen with blank borders around it, or alternatively, a full-size background image that scales, while the other elements of the site do not (at this stage)
• Slower performance of animation and blending. Flash is still the best at what it does. You must remember that. It does many things for which there is simply no replacement. We are not moving away from it because it is poor, simply because the current mobile device monopoly owner refuses to allow us to use it on their devices. I still feel ticked off by this as you may well do also. The end result of Apple’s big greedy boycott policy is a squashing of internet creativity in order to protect their own profit margins. The internet was never meant to be this way. If you want to know why I think Apple have done this read here:
• Javascript too can be disabled. Without javascript, this new version won’t look right either but then again, almost nothing does. The good news is that all devices across all platforms have javascript enabled by default so you have to intentionally turn it off for the new site to fail its presentation.
• The software can be stolen. This may not concern you too much, but I’ll tell you anyway. Once your flash site is created, it is packaged up into a single file that is very hard to open and inspect to see how the internal workings are created. This is precisely why Apple don’t allow it. With Javascript, every character written in code can be read by anyone. It’s call “view source”. It simply means “show me how they are doing this”. In the long run, it means that your competition can simply copy your site, change the logo, the images and some text and have a site that looks and works exactly the same. that could be bad.

Within these restrictions, there is not a lot that we can’t do in javascript that we did in Flash, albeit a little slower. So don’t be too concerned. The world is constantly changing and we must change with it. I do hope that web development will one day be free again from companies who refuse ‘this’ technology or ‘that’ instead of simply allowing everything on their hardware. Until then, we are under Apple’s control and there’s no use protesting – let’s take advantage of every change.

So check out both these examples -. For those of you who get on board with this change in the next three months, you will get free upgrades as we refine the delivery method to get the best results, so don’t be shy to jump in first. You can expect that the upgrade will cost between $800 and $1800 depending on how old your site is and how complex. But if you’re like a client I sat with yesterday seeing that 750 people had visited his site on ipads and iphones over the last 3 months, you will know that you simply must show them something better than a text-only site. It will pay a good return on this small investment.

Call me for more info. Ph 0408 826 455

Brent.