Why your flashy website could be hurting your bar business

Posted by barblog on May 4, 2010 in Bar Management | 6 comments

If your bar or nightclub website is more than 3 or 4 years old, there’s a good chance that some “flash” elements were used to add a dramatic intro, flashy transition effects, to build your contact form or even to build the entire site.

Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform that is popular for adding animation and interactivity to web pages.

Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, and various web page Flash components, to integrate video into web pages, to make games and more recently, to develop rich Internet applications. But here’s the problem, as your bar customers become more mobile and tech savvy and more and more iphones and ipads flood the market, you are going to have a bigger and bigger problem, because these devices do not run flash which means that your website won’t show to anyone searching for your business on these devices.

But it’s only a matter of time before these devices run this software, right? Wrong. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple stirred up a lot of controversy this week by announcing that his touch screen devices will never run flash. He considers it an outdated type of software and unfit for the functions Apple products are designed for. Specifically, he says, flash was designed for a mouse, with it’s fancy rollover effects, none of which are needed on a touch screen device that will never have a mouse attached.

Is this a big problem, you might ask?

Well lets assume you undertake some form of text message advertising and promoting to your customers. If they open these messages on their iphones or ipads and want to find out more by visiting your website, DEAD END! Your flash website which was once praised for having amazing animation and sounds, is now out of date and will display as a simple blue error box in the middle of the screen, so it may be time to review your site to make sure it can remain relevant and a key part of your marketing effort. Your competitors might be…

468 ad
Post comment as
twitter logo facebook logo
Sort: Newest | Oldest
Barrye

Forex broker reviews gives you the best forex broker rating.www.broker-rating.com Finding your the lowest spread forex broker

share
  • spam
  • offensive
  • disagree
  • off topic
 Like
Belle blonde

I love the new iPad, what do you think of it ?

share
  • spam
  • offensive
  • disagree
  • off topic
 Like
Cheap Insurance Quotes

Thank you so much for this, Anne. Such wise words to heed to. Keeping all those affected in prayer.

share
  • spam
  • offensive
  • disagree
  • off topic
 Like
Gel

What your article fails to note is that ALL these devices are moving towards Flash. Android, Windows MObile, WebOS...all the major Mobile Operating systems will be running Flash within the year. The only one that won't is Apple. In fact, Google Chrome the austere and minimalist browser will have Flash built into the next version (now in BETA).

Flash adds much needed visual aesthetics, interactivity, and a common interface across browsers. To account for Mobile devices your site should have a Mobile version in the first place with scaled down graphical content, and other design elements. This can be implemented via CSS or an actual Subdomain such as http://mobile.mybar.com

Flash is a tool. It can be used very well and to great effect (Gmail uses Flash, did you know that?) or it can be misused and overused.

Apple's decision on Flash has next to nothing to do with the Consumer and everything to do with its own business model.

Cheers :-)

share
  • spam
  • offensive
  • disagree
  • off topic
 Like
Premium Wordpress Plugin