PSD7 LAUNCHES SITE 7

The Big Question: “Where's the Flash?”

After nearly 3 years of tireless, faithful service, PSD7 Site 6 has been officially mothballed to make room for the new improved Site 7, which you are visiting right now. The question on everyone’s lips? “Where's the Flash?”

PSD7 Site 6 was the recipient of many glowing reviews, and was responsible for a huge expansion in PSD7’s client base. Many attributed these positive results to the slick animation and seamless user interface made possible by running the Macromedia Flash platform. So why would PSD7 abandon its recipe for success?

“Flash isn't the best solution for everything,” explains PSD7 Creative Director Paul Seymour. “It’s ideal for web animation, as well as for rich internet applications. The kind of projects we do for our clients. Take Abbott Labs, for example. To produce a new media handbook for both CD-ROM and web, seamlessly displaying video and images without requiring any extra plug-ins, all tied together into a comfortable user interface, Flash is ideal.”

However, PSD7 has a different set of objectives from Abbott. The purpose of the PSD7 site is to describe what we do, provide links to what we’ve done, perform well in search engine page ranking, and be easily maintained.

“Fact is,” Paul ellaborates, “Flash can be quite time consuming to maintain. You’ve got to determine that the cost of this extra time is worth it, given the benefits you’re getting out of using Flash.” For PSD7, these costs outweighed the benefits.

Moreover, a Flash site cannot be indexed by search engine spiders. That means that a search engine cannot find a piece of text if it is embedded within Flash, and in fact will miss entire pages of text if the links to those pages are embedded in Flash. This results in a low search engine page ranking. “For that reason alone,” explains Paul, “we had to have two sites running parallel: one Flash site for the “wow” appeal, and another XHTML/CSS site for the search engines.” Talk about a hassle to maintain!

PSD7 provides valuable advice to its clients regarding issues like this, whether or not to use a particular platform such as Flash for a project with a set of objectives. With Site 7, we are now taking our own advice, trying to combine the “wow” with the functional. Of course, we couldn’t resist putting some Flash into the site. And naturally, we still produce many Flash-based projects for our clients. But for the time being, we’re all very happy with the new look. Please let us know your opinion!

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