The company that I work for started a website for one of the services that we offer about 2 years ago. It was given to me to design and implement. Since then, the site needed an overhaul.
I am by no means a designer. However, I can code in html and css like a machine. The design work was handed out to a third party designer and I was given the task of coding it to a functional web page.
I am a stickler for web standards. I hate flash. I hate IE. All the things that a designer really doesn't care about. So when it came time for me to take the mock ups and turn them into web pages, I was in for a treat.
The designer sent me the images, I sliced them up in Photoshop, and started coding. Then it came to my attention that the front page was going to contain a flash movie. All I asked the designer was, is to please give me a still image that I could put in for a fall back for those that don't have Flash installed. What was I sent? An email with statistics on how many computers had Flash.
OK...not what I asked for but I had some ground to work on. My response? I simply told the designer that it was not fair and not in the best interest of the company to discriminate against those that don't like Flash. I do not have Flash on my computer...I don't even run Windows.
Why don't I like Flash? It's useless. All the moving around of this and that while I'm trying to read the content on the page is distracting at the least. Flash is a tool for the designers that can't code. I know I know...there *can* be scripting involved with Flash but WHO CARES! What's PHP, JavaScript, dHTML, Perl and all those languages for? Scripting! Not some GUI based whatchamagig that you can put a picture here and make this move here and do something over this way. Just too distracting. I go to a website for the content. Now if it's a nice looking site, then that's all the better. But content is king.
The battle ended a few minutes ago when I asked one more time for the still images. They are now in my inbox waiting on my to finish this post so I can make the 7% of the population happy again. I win :)
