Some of you will be familiar with the idea of "Flash" on web pages. Flash is a special visual interface programming language that used to run on nearly everything. It's commonly used for movie web pages – those fancy websites that you go into that do everything for you. YouTube and similar sites use it to show videos in a portable way.
It used to be that Flash was a great idea as it just worked everywhere.
Not so anymore!
There are two very serious problems with Flash these days.
The first – and worst – is that Flash doesn't work on iphones and iPads! That's right, if you use Flash in your web page, particularly if you use it heavily, your web page won't be visible on these important Apple platforms! The reasons it doesn't work are complex but are largely due to Steve Jobs' idealogical dislike for Flash. While that may change over time, it doesn't work right now.
However the second reason is just as bad:
Flash doesn't work with Google! For the most, Google simply can't read flash-based webpages! This means that in most cases if you have a flash based website, it will not be indexed in Google unless you do some special shenanigans (like completely duplicating your website in plain text so Google can read it!).
The strong point of Flash is that it is very portable, when it works, and it allows some sorts of more complex user interfaces to be written – for instance, Flash-based game sites are quite common around the internet.
These days one of the most common uses of Flash is to provide an "image rotator" that rotates images on your home page in an attractive way – fading or fading and sliding new images in and out. If your website uses this, ipads and iphones won't be able to see it.
The good news, however, is that image rotation can now be accomplished using javascript (built into nearly all web browsers). Making the change is fairly simple, too, particularly if the image rotation is only on a few pages.
If your website uses Flash, chat to us about changing over to something more portable.
By the way, for those of you who like to follow trends, HTML5 is at least partly intended to replace flash, but at this stage it's not implemented in many browsers; but stay tuned as it may become more common. At least at this point a javascript image viewer is likely to be more portable.