I’ll address your points below.

1. Accessibility for me goes beyond the installation of the Flash plugin, it enters into the realm of alienating a group of people with disabilities whom for what ever reason have special browser needs which Flash doesn’t support. Again anytime you create a Barrier to Entry you run the risk of losing a job or sale. Granted I know that most users will have the flash player installed.

2. You can achieve this with other non flash and more compliant technologies such as ajax etc…

3. We are on the same page with this one.

4. Same Page

5. I’m not 100% convinced that live books and others are giving a fair assessment of how well their sites can be SEO’d. And I’m certain that it’s no where near the level that you can with other platforms like wordpress, joomla and others.

To add another layer of complexity to all of this, Google has set in motion a new set of initiatives for 2010 and that is Website size is now going to play a factor in search engine ranking. If this happens sites that are under 20k are going to rise to the top and all the bloated flash sites are going to fall off the map.

Just something to think about.

Thanks again for taking the time to share your insight.

Keep up the great work with your podcast.

Cris…

1) Audience and accessibility. Find me a currently shipping browser that doesn’t have the flash plugin installed when you install the browser. Part 2 of this is… find me a potential client who isn’t using a reasonably current browser. Can people in small villages in 3rd world countries see flash websites? No, but they also aren’t likely to be my audience/customer/client.

2) Agreed that “whiz-bang” isn’t important; images are. But, what Flash sites often offer is the ability to have images that are nice and big and scale with browser size.

3) You’re right that Flash sites are hard to update unless… unless you go with one of the high-quality commercial sites that are out there… LiveBooks, ZenFolio or Visual Server. Then, it’s easy. I always advise photographers who don’t want to monkey around with “learning how to ‘do’ the web” to buy into one of these turnkey situations. It’s fast, it’s easy and it works.

4) Totally right-on with this one. Mystery nav is no fun and bookmarking individual images/pages on a flash site is impossible.

5) Search. The big dog players in the Flash arena like LiveBooks have this nailed. They’ve spent a lot of time solving the problem of Flash vs. search. See:
http://www.livebooks.com/features-tour/overview#navbar=13

So… I’m not sayin’ you’re wrong here, but just that a lot of the problems have been solved. I’ll also say that I’ve mentioned LiveBooks a couple of times but I don’t work for them, just in case someone thinks I’m trolling.

I agree SlideShowPro ROCKS but again it’s what i consider a web application and is tightly integrated with a php/mysql backend for easily managing your galleries. This is a perfect marriage and example of Flash and the web.

Cris…

To those who think that interaction means watching the words slide around… WRONG. It means that the visitor can interact with the site and the photographer. Non interactive sites are like showing your book to an AD while you are on your cell phone with a finger to your lips telling them to keep quiet.

I want to invite dialogue and comments and the ability to share.

Flash allows little of that along with the non-SEO reality. And when I hear people say “Oh, we got an HTML site running to allow for that…” well, I just smile. Sure you do. And sure it does.

Heh.

JI

Stephanie
twitter.com/missgraham