Flash Websites for Photographers, good idea or kiss of death?

Flash is an interactive language used on many photographer websites to bring a level of interactivity and display options that until recently were not possible in HTML. Apple has refused to support Flash in the iPhone and iPad, and Flash has been beset with problems ranging from high CPU utilization to SEO problems.

Yet, Flash can still be found on 98% of personal computers.

The experts chimed in:

• Thad Allender is a photographer and founder of Graph Paper Press, website designs and tools for creatives based on WordPress.
• Will Critchlow is an SEO and web expert who co-founded Distilled Ltd.
• Roberto De Luna is a photographer and photo editor at Time Out New York
• Rob Haggart is the brains behind APhotoEditor.com and the creator of APhotoFolio.com, portfolio websites for creatives.
• Grover Sanschagrin is a photographer and vice president & co-founder, PhotoShelter.
• Mike Schmidt is the founder of Mohawk Street, an interactive multimedia, production and website design firm.

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Thad Allender is a photographer and multimedia producer based in Washington, D.C. He is the former multimedia producer for USA Today and the founder of Graph Paper Press, a web development company focused on creating tools and designs for creatives using WordPress.

There is a laundry list of reasons to abandon Flash.  Everyone knows that it doesn’t work on mobile devices like the iPhone or iPad, but that is merely a result of a bigger problem: Flash is proprietary and doesn’t adhere open web standards.  The web is moving away from it at a rapid speed because of advances in html, css, and javascript.

It’s easy to hate Flash, but in reality, we owe it a great deal of appreciation.  For years, there were few alternatives to Flash on the web: Browsers sucked, web standards were a new thing, and “Google” was a start-up, not a verb.   Flash filled a niche where the capability of web browsers fell short.  Fast forward a few years and now we have HTML 5, which introduces new ways of presenting multimedia nativity in the browser.  Times are changing, and so, we must change with it. 

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Will Critchlow is the founder and chief strategist for the web design and optimization firm Distilled Ltd. He is regularly quoted in a wide range of media on the subject of SEO and internet marketing. Will is a Google Qualified Professional. 

Coming from an SEO perspective, I would counsel photographers (and anyone else) to avoid websites build entirely in Flash. From an SEO perspective, there is no issue with using rich media elements on a page in much the same way that you would include an image on a page, but you should seek to avoid including important text and, crucially, navigation. In short, Flash can provide great benefits within a portfolio, but use it sparingly and don’t make it crucial to the navigation or understanding of your website.

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Roberto De Luna is an American photographer & photography editor. He has recently been featured in the Dutch art periodical Eyemazing, and also held a solo exhibition entitled “Facing West,” which was reviewed in New Yorker Magazine as “appealingly, deceptively casual.” Presently Mr. De Luna is the Photography Editor of Time Out New York. Mr. De Luna is the proud parent of a black & tan dachshund named Nacho. (photo by by Jolie Ruben)

When it comes to flash, there’s really only one word that comes to mind, and that’s LIMITING. For starters, there’s nothing more embarrassing than taking a photographer’s website to a creative director or editor in chief, and telling them to “Just ignore the TEDDY BEAR’S PICNIC flash intro, and click on SKIP…”

If you have an animation style intro, or laboriously animated interface, I’m more apt to pass on this work. It’s not that I have a personal objection to this kind of aesthetic (which honestly I do, but that’s not the point) more so to say that if I can’t get your work in front of SOMEONE ELSE’S face rapidly and practically, It’s going to get lost in translation, or I’m not going to send it at all. It may sound harsh, but it’s the physics and reality of how many hours are in a day. If your site takes a full minute to load, that’s a full minute I could have been discussing your work with the art team.

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Rob Haggart is the former Director of Photography for Men’s Journal and Outside Magazine. He has received photo editing recognition from Graphis, American Photography, Society of Publication Designers, Communication Arts, American Society of Magazine Editors, Photo District News, and was chosen as part of the creative team of the year by Ad Week. He currently freelances as a Photography Director and runs APhotoEditor.com and APhotoFolio.com, a flash based portfolio service for photographers.

It’s hard to beat Flash for showing off photography. When I worked as a Photography Director I looked at thousands upon thousands of websites and I was always wowed by how well flash displayed photography. I also never heard anyone complain about it. That’s why I chose it as the main language for the sites I build now. It allows you to easily scale images, embed high end magazine and advertising fonts (legally), video playback is flawless (plus they can’t be easily stolen) and it’s compatible with older Internet Explorer browsers that are still extremely common. Additionally you can achieve the same search engine results with a flash site as you can with HTML (backlinks are the key here, not HTML).

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Grover Sanschagrin is Vice President of Business Development and co-founder of PhotoShelter. An industry veteran, Sanschagrin, who started his career as a photojournalist, has vast experience with online productions including major roles with SportsShooter.com, ChicagoTribune.com and the Quokka Sports Network (including NBCOlympics.com and FinalFour.net). He has spoken at numerous industry conferences and universities with one goal: To educate photographers about the importance of building a successful online marketing strategy that will result in more assignments, more image sales, and less time in front of a computer.

A photographer website built entirely in Flash has become a liability, not an asset, and should be avoided. Photographers with Flash-based websites should start formulating their evacuation plan now, because those with these websites will soon find themselves losing ground to those who don’t.

The evidence is clear. Flash-based websites suffer SEO penalties, run slowly on some computers, don’t run at all on iPhones and iPads, are statistically proven to attract fewer inbound links, are nearly impossible to conduct image archive searches and e-commerce, and are much more expensive to design, produce, and change. In an attempt to get around some of these limitations, elaborate work-arounds (like “shadow HTML sites”) have been implemented.

These workarounds clearly prove that, on it’s own, Flash is not a sufficient solution for the needs of a photographer today.

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Mike Schmidt is psyched about storytelling, graphic design, motion graphics, interactive design and video production. When he’s not building interactive multimedia audio and video graphics packages for clients like the New York Times, and the Open Society Institute, he can be found teaching the next generation of visual communicators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he lectures as an Adjunct Professor. Mike worked as a videographer, editor, production manager, television producer, motion graphic designer, web designer, flash animator and multimedia art director before launching his own studio, Mohawk Street.

Photographers should avoid using Flash in their websites most of the time. Flash is great for immersive experiences and interactivity, but bad at search engine optimization and mobile devices (an obvious growth area on the web). A photographer’s website should not be an immersive experience like the Jim Carrey Site: http://www.jimcarrey.com/ because the goal of a photographer site is different. You want to show your photography in a way that the user can both meander through your work and hunt for a specific image at the same time. Users should see how awesome you are and want to hire you or license your work … so navigation, SEO, and image search become paramount.

The thing we used to use Flash for primarily on photographer sites was slideshow players and creative navigation solutions. At the time there was no other option for slideshows. Now there are many. As for creative navigation, research has shown time and again that users are easily confused when you deviate from basic navigation standards. Unless the navigation is the thread weaving a story together, the best way to get viewers to engage with your site is to present great content in a familiar framework.