Clunky and badly designed animation has flooded the web for as long as I can remember.  In the early days this phenomenon belonged to the animated gif files blinking furiously at you in an erratic attempt to attract your attention, while in comparison today’s web is littered with a mixture of gif, javascript and now flash animation. So this has made me wonder, is this animation simply a crude distraction that is degrading our web experience and masking the quality beneath, or is this what our aspiration for the web should be?

I am going to try as hard as I can to not be biased here but I have some pretty major issues with Flash!  Firstly it is not truly accessable to users, for those who have problems with their sight Flash offers a poor experience giving screen readers no chance to express the content whether it be pictures or text. Secondly, Google have made steps forward with the indexing of Flash content, but no matter how well Google can manage this the content will always be sub-standard compared to well written HTML, and this only means that Google can index Flash other search engines have not made these advances, so Flash immediately is at a disadvantage as a web tool.

‘So Flash can’t be indexed big deal, it brings a more complete experience’ – This is the kind of response I hear when a flash developer defends their favourite tool.  Well, it’s not as simple as that, just because things can animate doesn’t mean that they should, when I visit a web site I want the easy to find content that I came for not a series of unnecessary animations flicking from picture to picture with pointless un-indexable messages in between! Nor do I want the pages or content to be randomly redrawn or to be erratically presented, just give me what I wanted that is why I am here, and why I have given your site a chance!  This is where I feel Flash has moved away from the accessible web of now and the future, the web is where we can express, entertain, share and learn, putting blocks in-front of this creates a lesser experience not a better one.  Maybe Flash should stay in its newly discovered home of television where more and more animators are using Flash to create amazing cartoons and animations for the visual world and to be honest it feels more accurately placed there.

See why I was worried about being biased! – So I will try and redress the balance – Flash is an amazing piece of animation software, in my time I have seen some amazingly executed Flash websites and rich application, these helped make the web a more visual experience during the time before quality design started to take hold.   The sad thing is that I believe Flash is being left behind as the drive to be at the top of a Google search takes hold; Flash cannot be indexed in this same way and the industry doesn’t seem in-a-rush to change that.  As Flash becomes an integral part of the visual media market maybe it will find its true place in the future of TV interactivity?

Overall, the lack of accessibility has always been an issue for me.  Not only has the web accepted flash for the building of websites but a large number of sites have adopted flash banner advertising as a way to generate cash, this is not only annoying but demonstrates a complete lack of understanding for how the web should be. 

In an ideal world we should strive for well designed, accessible websites which contain advertising that complements the web product cleanly and professionally instead of being a distracting add-on.  I hope the industry can move in the right direction, however Flash may simply be too popular!

Adverts are an integral part of the web, without web advertising most sites wouldn’t be able to bring us all that wonderful content for free so it is a shame that this medium of advertising has become a problem.  Users now have to cope with the ever increasing on-slaught of banners, pop-ups, pop-unders impact ads and well the list goes on, surely webmasters have started to realise that their users will inevitably go else where?

Websites across the world have surrounded their content with animated advertising whether it be simple .gif files or more complex flash animations which are on-the-whole completely unnecessary; don’t get me wrong, flash ads can be intelligently created delivering a clear message in a slick manner but ultimately these type of adverts are distracting to the user, we are trying to attract new users not scare them off, aren’t we?

Companies littering sites with these adverts is not being helped by an industry that delivers facts stating that animated adverts receiving more response which naturally implies that animation brings response, however, in my experience this hasn’t been proven true, some of the most successful advertising campaigns that I have witnessed have been simple quality designs with limited or no animation.

“For some reason it seems to have escaped every body’s attention that if we annoy our users they will go somewhere else, now what use to an advertiser is a website with no users?”

All any website wants to do is increase its user base while at the same time making enough money to keep it afloat, if we keep cramming over the top advert animations into web templates eventually the users will leave which inevitably will mean the money will to.

Smashing Magazine, Web Designer Wall and even the New York Times are just a few sites that use static adverts well, while others, and we all know who they are treat their web pages like a fun fair.  It’s not just the sites mentioned that are moving to a simpler way to advertise there are a number of sites coming up with more intelligent ways to incorporate adverts so that it becomes a part of the design and not an added extra.

I am guilty of getting caught up in the easy sell to customers of animation, so I am willing to do my bit to make web adverts feel less ridiculous and to show those who request overly animated designs the way forward.  If you read this article, and agree with the concept that less is more then please try and do your bit, if we all do a little to help stop this over use of animation it will eventually force a good change within the industry.