When your favorite tool is a hammer...
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Friday, Dec 2, 2005 / 11:01am View more articles
Recently, iMarc's team page needed to be updated -- there wasn't room for new people. A designer was tasked with updating the page to support a larger team, and make it easy to update. He designed a really cool whiz-bang interactive Flash interface. Updates would be easy -- new photo, add a text file, export the Flash to web, done.
Then our technical director walked in and asked to see it, and said "Wait, what about accessibility? The most popular web hits on our site are for our staff, especially Kim Jackson. This thing isn't spiderable. When we updated our site last month and made it a ton more accessible, we jumped way up in Google's rankings. If we deploy this, we'll fall back down."
Strident, even vociferous, argument ensued.
The real problem was not the tool. It was that the project requirements had been incompletely specified, so the person tasked with solving the problem came up with a great solution to the problem as specified, just not one that satisfied the complete requirements.
Sure, this never would have happened if it had been for a client. We work with the client to write explicit functional requirements, and get approval at checkpoints along the way. But when it's just our own stuff, we're less structured.
When you have a favorite tool or process, too often you see the problem solution in terms of that tool, and forget its drawbacks. In this particular case, it's the extra work required to make a Flash interface fully accessible to search engines and non-desktop web browsers. You can design a Flash application to pull its content out of the same data source as a server-side script generating accessible pages on demand. It's not even particularly hard, it just requires more time and possibly another developer to do it.
Define the needs. Then define the audience. Then define the specs. Then, and only then, pick a tool. The right tool. Even if it's not your favorite tool.
Then our technical director walked in and asked to see it, and said "Wait, what about accessibility? The most popular web hits on our site are for our staff, especially Kim Jackson. This thing isn't spiderable. When we updated our site last month and made it a ton more accessible, we jumped way up in Google's rankings. If we deploy this, we'll fall back down."
Strident, even vociferous, argument ensued.
The real problem was not the tool. It was that the project requirements had been incompletely specified, so the person tasked with solving the problem came up with a great solution to the problem as specified, just not one that satisfied the complete requirements.
Sure, this never would have happened if it had been for a client. We work with the client to write explicit functional requirements, and get approval at checkpoints along the way. But when it's just our own stuff, we're less structured.
When you have a favorite tool or process, too often you see the problem solution in terms of that tool, and forget its drawbacks. In this particular case, it's the extra work required to make a Flash interface fully accessible to search engines and non-desktop web browsers. You can design a Flash application to pull its content out of the same data source as a server-side script generating accessible pages on demand. It's not even particularly hard, it just requires more time and possibly another developer to do it.
Define the needs. Then define the audience. Then define the specs. Then, and only then, pick a tool. The right tool. Even if it's not your favorite tool.
Comments
Saturday, Dec 10, 2005 / 2:11pm
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True, search enginges CAN spider flash sites, but getting higher placement is a lot easier with well formed HTML and good content.
Assuming "one of the top interactive agencies" is building flash sites for big clients, that may also play a factor. Build a flash site for Volkswagen, and it's going to be on every search engine, because the brand is super-popular, and many other sites link to the vw.com. But build a flash site for a tiny company...who knows? we should try it.
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Actually, spiders are funny. At a firm I was previously employed with (to remained unnamed) we specialized in some various search engine marketing techniques. We also were considered one of the top interactive agencies in a certain mountainous state. We built Flash-only sites all the time and had no problem getting them indexed with all of the "popular" search engines.
Snoogins.