Slow, cumbersome Flash-based site
Tropical Smoothie Café
reviewed Jan. 2008
Tropical Smoothie Café's site makes a
number of obvious mistakes, any one of which is problem
enough, and all of which together serve to give the
visitor a truly awful experience.
Splash page
The first problem is the "Splash page", which
is a home page that requires users to click to "Enter"
the site. A splash page serves absolutely no purpose
other than to waste the visitor's time. When visitors
arrive at the site, they should already be at the
site; the page they see should be the site itself. They
shouldn't be made to jump through any more hoops to get
what they already asked for. A website is not a building,
it doesn't need a door. As a designer, when you can
choose between something useful to display first (the
actual site) or something useless (a splash page), it
should be obvious which to choose.
This isn't a fringe opinion. Jakob Nielsen, the
most famous web usability expert in the world, said this
way back in 2000:
Splash pages were an
early sin of abusive web design. Luckily, almost all
professional websites have removed this usability
barrier.
If you always try to think about your site from the
perspective of your visitors, mistakes like splash pages
will be easy to avoid. In fact, these kinds of
mistakes arise from having the opposite view, trying to
please the site owner rather than the customers who will
use the site. The site owner with the cumbersome site can
think, "Look at how clever / cute / entertaining we
are!", without considering the feelings of the people
actually using the site. But the true test of a site
isn't how well it pleases the owner, it's how well it
pleases the owner's customers.
However, for site owners who insist on the
self-centered approach, there is still a reason to
avoid splash pages: Fewer people will actually see
the site. That's because, for whatever reason, a huge
percentage of visitors will never click the "Enter"
button. Perhaps it's because they think that any site
with a useless splash page is going to have more minor
headaches waiting behind the Enter button. (In this case,
they'd definitely be right.) Whatever the reason, the
bottom line is that fewer visitors actually see the site
content with a splash page because they don't bother to
enter. And that's the opposite of what the site owner
wants; the site owner dearly wants visitors to see what
the company has to offer. Tropical Smoothie is getting
fewer true visitors than they bargained for.
Once I noticed a friend's site had a splash page, and
I asked her to check her traffic stats, promising her
that she would discover that huge numbers of visitors
bail on the splash page without ever entering. She did,
and she was floored -- it was exactly as I promised.
Popup window
The second problem with the Tropical Smoothie
site is that if you do decide to Enter, you get a
gratuitous popup window for the site to load in.
There are only two times when it's appropriate to open a
link in a new window:
- When providing supplementary info about what
the visitor is already looking at. (e.g., a
closeup photo, or some Help text) But even so, that
information is usually better displayed within
or on top of the current page, if at all
possible.
- When linking to a completely separate
(external) site. (e.g., some other company's
site)
What you don't want to do is what Tropical Smoothie
did: open a page for the same site in a new
window. That just clutters the user's screen for no good
reason. It also breaks the Back button in their browser,
which will no longer work.
The popup window serves no purpose other than to annoy
the site's visitors.
Flash-only
For as long as Flash has been around, web
experts have been cautioning not to do entire sites in
Flash only. Here's a small sample of that advice:
Why all this advice against Flash? The main reasons
are:
- Flash sites typically take a long time to
load.
- Flash sites typically take a long time to
use.
The Tropical Smoothie Café site is no
exception. After I got the useless splash page and
clicked the Enter button and got the gratuitious popup
window, I had to wait 40 full seconds for all the
Flash junk to load. And that's on a fast computer, with
broadband Internet. This is simply the height of web
design arrogance. It's as though the site owner is
thinking, "Our site is so awesome that you will just sit
there patiently and wait a long time for everything to
load, because your time is not important, the only thing
that is important is that you see our awesome website.
Our site is all that matters."
It didn't end there. Once I pointed or clicked
any button, I'd have to wait some more. A lot more. When
in frustration I tried to simply close the window to give
up, it took my computer seven seconds to close the
window!
But slow usability isn't the only problem with
Flash sites. Nielsen
cites three problems:
...Flash technology
tends to discourage usability for three
reasons:
- it makes bad design more
likely,
- it breaks with the Web's
fundamental interaction style,
- and it consumes resources
that would be better spent enhancing a site's core
value.
And just like with splash pages, Flash sites aren't
just bad for users, they're bad for site owners as
well. Here's why:
- Search engine problems. Search engines
can't read Flash easily, if at all. That means that a
Flash-only site won't show up in search results nearly
as often as a non-Flash site. That means less traffic.
A lot less traffic.
- Cumbersome reporting. With a regular HTML
site, it's easy to get a report of which pages your
visitors looked at, what pages they came from, and so
forth. With Flash, all bets are off. It's possible to
get this to work if you carefully program in calls to
a program like Google Analytics for every possible
mouseclick on the site, but that's either a lot more
work if you're doing it yourself, or a lot more
expense if you're hiring someone else to do so.
- Updates are difficult. Lots of people can
update an HTML site. Few can edit Flash. If you want
changes to your Flash site, then unless you can do it
yourself, you're going to be paying someone else to do
it -- and paying them a lot more than a typical web
developer.
A way around most of these problems is to simply
include a regular (HTML) version of the site in addition
to the Flash version. If you're sure you must have
Flash, then keep it and at least give visitors who don't
like it the option to use something normal. Then those
visitors can have a nice, fast experience, the search
engines can index your content, and your reporting will
work fine.
How Tropical Smoothie Café
can fix these problems
- Re-do the site in HTML, and have it come up
immediately at TropicalSmoothie.com (without a splash
page), -OR-
- Have the splash page give visitors the choice between
the Flash version and an HTML version.
- If keeping the Flash version, make it load and work
at least 15 times faster.
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