Flash is no Flash in the Pan

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There’s no mistaking this domain. A pleasant animated intro fades in, and high quality looped MP3 music wafts through the speakers. More animation follows, and it is of a remarkably fluid quality.

Macromedia’s Flash plug-in is winning over more and more developers. A strong alternative to clunky, time-dependant GIF animation files, Flash’s vector format translates mathematical formulae into full-screen, streaming animation. But is there a place for Flash in the highly competitive, ever-changing world of e-commerce? Michael Peckham of CSM Systems believes that Flash is relevant to e-commerce, but chiefly in terms of aesthetics.

"Flash is mostly used for site decoration … the non-dynamically generated parts of the site," Peckham observes. "In some cases, it’s used for specific product displays to give richer content, and in that venue, Flash is a competitor with Java and QuickTime. It’s a use that is basically client-driven - and none of our clients have asked for anything like that."

E-commerce, despite its current volatility, remains an effective accessory to any bricks-and-mortar operation; it’s an excellent way to reduce operating costs, while increasing market share and overall customer satisfaction. The current numbers speak for themselves: the online business-to-consumer marketplace will surpass $700 million by 2003, and there are currently more than 600 million surfers around the world. So why not try to attract that audience with multimedia bells and whistles?

"It’s more akin to producing a television show. It’s pizzazz, whereas HTML is the nuts and bolts," Peckham explains. But Flash, he points out, does have its place. "It’s a fantastic technology, and we use it for demonstration purposes, tutorials, walk-throughs, that sort of thing."

In the old days, raster-formatted animation files ruled the roost, although they suffered from perpetually slow download; a single animation frame needed a lot of data to describe each pixel. If there were a number of frames, the download could be huge, and trying of customers’ patience. In Flash, mathematical data is stored as plain text, and the amount of text needed to create a whole screen of animation is very small. But Jim Elve, co-owner of Jelve Design, points out that download time is still an issue.

"The multimedia Web sites, like the Flash sites, have a lot of appeal … I don’t want to (dismiss) the Flash site too much, because we love Flash. We love working with it and we think it has a great potential. The biggest problem we have today is with the slow dialup connections that limit our delivery, and which put a lot of constraints on Flash design."

Elve, who also moderates several Flash discussion boards, thinks that the greatest error designers make is in the gratuitous use of Flash intros. A rule of thumb is that the typical user will tolerate 8 to 10 seconds of nothingness on a page before moving on.

"The guys in the marketing department get around the board table and start looking at the designer’s Flash intro. Everybody loves it, but the typical viewer hates it. It’s sort of like being forced to watch a commercial for something before you can actually start buying." Elve suggests the need for interactivity if a developer is going to use Flash. That is, giving the visitor options at every step of the way - such as allowing them to by-pass Flash intros, turn MP3 music on or off, or select an HTML version of the site.

Elve has a rule when assessing pages at the Flashkit site, an online resource for Macromedia tutorials, instruction and advice. "If I’m … looking at a screen loader for longer than two minutes I just turn it off and give them (the site owner) a message that they need to do some optimizing, because no one’s ever going to look at their site."

Some developers have gotten around the ubiquitous "Loading" screen by making a little game that people can play while they’re waiting, an approach that Elve approves of. But he believes that the real trick is to have a site that enjoys the enhancement of Flash technology, but which is delivered as quickly as an HTML site.

The big question, of course, is if there is a place for Flash in e-commerce. Elve believes that once DSL and other high-speed Internet connections become standard, commerce sites will become more conducive to Flash. As it stands, there are very few e-commerce sites that are entirely Flash-driven, and those that are tend to limit themselves to introductions and MP3 loops.

Peckham also sees the technology as being an extremely useful tool for ad-based promotion. "The whole Internet advertising model is being re-thought. One theory is that something similar to printed magazine-style ads will become more prevalent as advertisers demand more value for their online advert bucks. Just as we might flip through some ad pages to get to print mag articles, we might have to start moving through some ad pages online to get to the next thing we are looking for. These ads will be more likely to catch the viewer’s attention if they have multimedia features, such as Flash."