A few years ago I had a friend teach me how to hack. We really didn't do anything destructive. He just showed me how to infect a computer with a Trojan horse virus, connect to it remotely and do some basic schoolboy pranks like turning the monitor on and off, opening the CD tray, etc. What he also told me were some great words of advice. It's not our job to use technology to prey upon the ignorant in order to teach them a lesson. Regardless of how much fun harboring the thought is, you wouldn't beat someone up with a hammer because they didn't know how to use it correctly, would you?

During the clichéd Dot Com boom, many companies opted to outshine their competitors by producing cutting edge Flash-based web-sites. Being new to the industry at the time, I was swept up in the pageantry and expression of a new, interactive and animated web. I scoured forums and links on other designers' websites looking for the best intro, the best use of sound loops and other such novelties. I'd keep tabs on the likes of Anson Vogt of phong.com, rayoflight.net, and the famed Pixelranger. I even tried my hand at building my own site completely in Flash. It was a much bigger project than I thought it would be, and mainly due to paying projects I never fully completed it. This was my own attempt at impressing anyone coming to my site and putting myself above other designers who just stuck with static html pages. After all, anyone who was too stupid to not install the Flash plug-in to see my site and others didn’t need to see them at all.

What I neglected to think about were the numerous people who either didn’t understand the Flash plug-in, or simply didn’t want it installed. I also didn’t consider people whose computers and connections weren’t powerful enough to effectively display moving images and audio. These users are getting punished daily by a remaining handful of designers who just don’t know any better or are too arrogant to care.

One of the most popular sites for downloading free sound loops and sound effects for flash was Flashkit.com. It is still running, but there is rarely any new content posted, and it's slammed full of ads and poor, outdated layout. Most designers have moved on from the 1.5Mb Flash intros with thumping, corny tech music playing. They realize now that many people just don’t want to sit through it. Their audience has seen all the marketing phrases drifting in and out, the pseudo-helpful “skip intro” link on the bottom, and the following page that usually can’t be bookmarked.

It’s not the long download time or the bad music choice that bothers me the most. It’s the overall inaccessibility. What if I like a particular page on a Flash site and I’d like to bookmark it, or I just want to send the link to a friend? Impossible. I’d have to tell my friend to bypass the intro, click on this and/or that, then maybe if there isn’t confusing navigation he’ll find what I want him to. What’s worse, he might be one of those people who don’t have the plug-in installed. As for bookmarking a particular page, that won’t work either. How about those search engine bots that give a site a particular ranking based on the content it finds? There’s still no effective and established standard for search engines to index content, media and images built into an all-Flash web-site.

In my second half of this article, I'll offer some suggestions and techniques that I use in order to maintain usability and functionality.

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