When Flash first became popular, everyone jumped into the bandwagon. People scrambled for Flash designers who could make their websites look cool and, well, flashy because users just love looking at websites with great visual appeal. There certainly was a great improvement in how websites appeared. Gone are the days of static pages and stationary images because now you can add moving images, sounds and life-like designs.
But then people started to get annoyed with all those Flash websites. At the top of their complaints was that most of these websites contained nothing more but fancy sounds and images. At first, Flash was such a novel idea that people didn't really care whether or not they were getting anything from the website. And then when the Flash hysteria died down and people went back to their original goals of looking for information that can help them in their daily lives, they realized Flash was quite a nuisance. Not to mention that it significantly slowed down the website's loading time and wore down people's patience.
It's exciting new trends like Flash that can easily drive you over into the bleeding edge and cause you to commit business suicide. It is one thing to never be afraid of innovating for the sake of improvement, but it's another to risk losing your business just so you can position yourself to get ahead. It's like when Windows Vista was first released by Microsoft. Everybody scrambled to get Vista on their PCs only to realize much later that the latest operating system from Microsoft was full of kinks. That is why extremely new technologies whose uses and advantages have not yet been tested fall into the "bleeding edge" category. They are so new it hurts. It cuts. It bleeds. It kills businesses.
Look at any website put together by an amateur web designer and you'll realize what I'm talking about. When it comes to getting ahead of the competition, amateurs try their hardest to succeed. It's understandable, considering just how tight the competition is in the web design market. What they don't realize is that the fact that they are trying to hard is causing their design to backfire on them.
Have you ever seen what I call a kitchen sink website? The designer simply loads in whatever he can think of into the website in the hopes that viewers will think he is a professional for knowing all these things. In the end, though he just ends up looking even more amateurish than before. Flash is one thing, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. You might also find overly fancy fonts that you have to squint your eyes to read, complicated frames that leave a lot of dead space around them and scrolling marquees at the bottom of the website. These are all no doubt complicated elements to program, but they are not much more effective at convincing your website's visitors to buy your products.
The best thing to do is still to opt for something less advanced. I'm not saying that you don't try to bring in something new. That's also committing business suicide, but just in a completely different way. Innovative businesses will always win the race, but it is important to watch what you're going into before falling all over yourself. Stay in the sweet spot, just behind the curve. That will make you way ahead of almost everybody else but you're also not the first one to fall flat on your face. Besides, in web design, the days of the simple text and lots of whitespace are making a comeback, thankfully because webmasters now realize the importance of giving more value in the form of useful, relevant and interesting information instead of aesthetically appealing designs.
You certainly don't need to have the coolest-looking website on the planet, you only have to be the best in your own niche. And how do you do that? Provide the most valuable content you can and let your SEO guys figure out what works and what doesn't.
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