Flash, Flash, everywhere!
August 9, 2007 – 2:38 pm
As of late, I’ve been seeing flash websites pop up everywhere. The latest FI-related one is called Lose Your Lunch Hour. We’ve seen Dump Your Bank and the Coop Crusader this year. It seems that lots of FI’s and organizations are spending money on these great looking flash sites, but what exactly is it they do? How are they getting monetized? (I doubt they are)
Two more examples outside of the FI industry: The Simpson’s Movie and Honda F1 Racing. These are clearly great marketing tools, but how can CU’s best take advantage of this new trend? Picking on bankers forever isn’t going to make any money, so how we incorporate great flash with a functional website? Coast Capital has some cool use of flash, but again, it is not a key component of their functional website. Maybe VanCity’s We All Profit? Another great example of a flash marketing website, but how can we use these?
3 Responses to “Flash, Flash, everywhere!”
As the co-creator of the now debunked Coop Crusader, I didn’t want to let this go by without commenting on it
I think the question at the heart of the post is a very good one, where does flash fit into the functionality of CU websites?
When I look at where it fits into the functionality (and not marketing) of most of the websites out there, I see two functional trends: media and data graphing & analysis.
The first is obvious. From YouTube to Pandora, almost everything that is audio or video on the web is powered by Flash. I don’t see this fitting into website functionality very much, however with the rise of laptops with webcams and mics, it could create some uses in the “Contact Us” or “Help” areas. (Think instead of “Fill Out this form”, “Click here and leave us a voicemail”)
I believe graphing and analysis provides some immediate opportunities. If you haven’t recently, checkout Google Analytics. The way they are using Flash to represent data very clean, very useful, and very cool.
Now I can imagine that a CU would have a ton of data to present to it’s members if it thought the members would actually give it a second glance. Maybe using flash can provide just that.
What do you think?
By Mark on Aug 15, 2007
While Flash is becoming widely adopted (Adobe claims that it runs on 97% of browsers and evidence that I’ve collected on Google Analytics leads me to believe that this is pretty close), I think the real future for Flash is actually Flex- the open source Flash programming language Adobe has developed for software engineers.
Flex charting is awesome- highly interactive and professional. The startup I’m working with made the switch from Java to Flex for our retirement planning applicaiton and we’re not looking back. When we demo it, people are really impressed with the interface and the interaction that’s allowed. It’s a much more powerful way to gather information than a page that looks like a spreadsheet.
When I work with the coders who have now effectively mastered Flex, I keep hearing them say “Man, Flex is awesome.” They’ve become evangelists just like me.
Flash is the future, because it’s everywhere, it’s media-rich and it behaves the same across browsers.
By Matt on Aug 24, 2007
Matt,
Great points. I haven’t gotten into Flex, but I can definitely see it’s benefits, especially (like I said earlier) in the arena of charts and data displays.
I also think the “same across browsers” argument will become even more important as developers begin to look at technologies that can perform the “same across devices”, providing a similar experience on both PCs and mobile devices.
Any clue how Flash currently fares in the mobile space?
By Mark on Aug 24, 2007