BRETT-REID.COM

I am starting to prefer Flash as an interface more and more each day - beautiful interface married to db-driven backend - the best of both worlds. I just don’t see decent Flash websites coming out of South Africa which is annoying me.

In my opinion, South Africa has yet to produce a Flash website which can remotely compete with the likes of www.bacardidj.com, www.gettheglass.com, www.2dvanced.com (almost 3 years old now) and of course www.nike.com (budget..). Our flash sites generally use 2-3 year old ideas from overseas sites except they are built with basic/inferior actionscript and badly configured server side. Most are driven by XML, very few use Flash Remoting. Make no mistake I know a few good Actionscripters out there but they are very few and far between.

So why are our flash sites so crap?

The first logical cause of this problem would be our bandwidth, Helkom to be exact. Dial-up is still unfortunately alive and kicking in this country and”I’m not waiting more than 10 seconds or I’m leaving” is the norm. I think badly built Flash sites from 3 - 4 years ago made local users anti-flash and it’s had aftershocks. Clients come to us having had terrible experiences with their previous flash sites and wanting XHTML/CSS only (and being quite vocal about it). Their previous sites were kind of like a bad lab experiment, a bloated 500kb+ swf file which took 15 minutes to load and then featured a globe spinning, possibly some floating text effects and some horrible sound loop you couldn’t turn off. But let’s face it, more and more people have ADSL these days. If they don’t have it at home, they have it at work, internet cafe, varsity, etc…

The primary cause would be SEO/SEM. It’s no secret that Flash doesn’t index nicely, I’ve heard Google’s bot can index swf’s to a certain extent but for that sort of info, ask an SEO expert. The bottomline is that quite a few clients still don’t want Flash and some of my overseas ones are pushing for basic XHTML/CSS sites all in the name of getting ranked. I agree with this to an extent but it’s dependent on your industry as well as the remote chance of you even getting onto the 12th page organically. Having a strong brand allows you to side-step this and go full flash. So why aren’t we seeing the stronger local brands going full flash? Yes there are www.klipdrift.co.za and www.primi-piatti.com (not full flash) are getting there but still not incredible.

The Ster Kinekor site stands out for me, not so much for design but more for functionality. It’s half decent looking, fast, functional and database-driven. They’re using XML as opposed to Flash Remoting but either way it works and does so at pace. I also think it involves a fair amount of risk to actually go ahead with a full flash website locally, especially on that scale.

So what is the solution? I think paying Actionscripters properly for a start, this would prevent the really good ones from leaving the country. Another solution would be for business owners/account executives to occasionally step away from xhtml/css or mixed flash/xhtml and venture into the full flash realm which only a handful of studio’s in sa do (Hello Computer springs to mind). Until then I think we’ll keep seeing very average to crap flash coming out of this country.