Macromedia Flash

I have a love-hate relationship with Macromedia Flash. It looks so cool on websites, but so easy to be a big headache for a number of reasons.

Back in 2001 Flash was pretty cutting edge and promised to be the next big thing on the internet, so I actually hired a dedicated flash specialist to created dedicated flash websites for our network. We advertised flash website design services and I kept feeding this guy money while waiting for orders to come in. In three months we didn’t get a single order and I canned the whole project.

In the meantime I wanted to use all the flash work he had created for our own sites. Lots of problems. Our search engine ranking plummeted because all of our SEO work was down the tubes when we switched to flash. Back then most people were still on dial-up as well so load time was very slow. Customers had to wait for load times and were frustrated, meanwhile back at empire headquarters we were all huddled around the computer screens going “Wow, isn’t that cool”.

I think it’s pretty well documented now how a total flash site can ruin a websites search engine rankings. In fact right now I have one competitor in a small niche market who switched to flash, and their site went off the Google map within a couple weeks. I wonder if they even realize the cause. Looking deeper at their code I don’t think they are real business saavy, just kind of lucked out. And I wonder if they are at the office looking at the screen going “Wow, isn’t this cool” while at the same time wondering why their sales have grinded to a halt.

BUT, because I’m in a lot of audio niches I’ve always loved the idea of having really cool flash intros. I got all hyped up on Flash again after visiting the new site for Aftermath Entertainment. I got the chance to do some pre-production work for one of their newest artists and was visiting the site to get a feel for Dr. Dre’s vibe.

What seems to work well is using flash headers in certain parts of a website, but keep the rest of the layout html or xhtml so you still have good info for search engine crawls. One example of this is at the website for McIntyre Hall Performing Arts Center – (which I’ll be performing at soon!) – They have a nice flash intro, and when you enter the main site they have a little flash header running. I think it’s very effective because it actually shows footage of their shows. (Currently showing a clip of Papageno from Mozart’s Magic Flute opera which I got to see at McIntyre Hall last year – GREAT performance). At the same time, you can easily navigate the site to quickly get the info you need. This kind of approach has slowly evolved over the last few years and for good reason. Give up a little of the coolness factor for functionality.

When I’m shopping or trying to retrieve info on the internet, it’s VERY frustrating to sit through flash presentations. When I’m shopping, I just want to find the info quickly. I don’t really care how “cool” your site is. I just want easy to find product descriptions, secure shopping and an indication that what you are selling is what I think I’m buying.

So here I have my own personal website and many people know I run a pretty large internet network. They expect something super cool – after all – I’m “Cybermonsters” and have done all this music stuff. I should be the guy. Ironically, I have never really worked on my personal site. Never thought it was important.

Armed with my new fervor to make my site the coolest composer site on the web I went searching for Flash programmers to create something cool for me. But I don’t want to wait, I want it now. I’ve got a few days before I go out of town and just want it to be finished. That’s when I started looking for flash templates I could customize.

Have you looked on the web for flash templates? I spent literally 6 hours scouring every site I could find, and with few exceptions they are all selling the same templates! In fact, one of my competitors redid their site in flash, and I see the template for sale for around sixty dollars! What a bunch of cheezeballs.

I’m guessing this mega network will get canned at one point by google, how can you have hundreds of sites selling the exact same templates? Event the same searching options. It looks more sinister than affiliate programs to me, looks like a gigantic network is sliding under the Google radar.

Finally biting the bullet after three days of finding the perfect template, finding a better one, finding a better one, etc ad nauseum – I finally decided to go with a very simple flash intro template to use for this site. It had really cool music, was simple so I thought I could edit it easily.

I buy the template for a whopping $34 and start to edit it. What a nightmare. What looked so simple was now bogged down in cheezy interfaces, and I was very lost with the editing. Not at all simple like had been insinuated on their website.

As I’m editing I realize how cheezy it is to use someone else’s music ON A COMPOSER WEBSITE! Would have been unforgiveable and I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. So I inserted my own audio in the Flash template. The template would not accept MP3 files, only .wav – And when I imported the audio as a .wav file something happened where it was so compressed it lost all it’s bandwidth. It sounded horrible! My beautiful orchestral piece that’s crystal clear as an MP3 file was now a hidous piece of garbage. And now the animation didn’t fit the audio. I played with the audio but it didn’t quite look right with my own track. How am I going to sell film scoring and composer services when I can’t even get my audio to match a stupid flash animation?

Well, my audio was never written for the flash animation, it was an orchestral piece I recorded several years ago. And the flash was never written for my audio. So to make this work I would need to compose a new piece for the flash animation, which seems like a total waste of time since I don’t have the expertise yet to do quality flash editing.

Dear Flash, I hate you and I love you. I’m dropping it for now. If I want flash for my site I’m going to send a dedicated audio file to a professional Flash animator, and have them animate the flash presentation to my audio. It will just be a little intro or a website header, keep the rest html based code.

Of course, by the time I get around to it everything will have changed again. So, when do they finish this internet thingy anyway? 🙂