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Is it Time to Rethink Your Flash Based Web Strategy?

Whether or not you’re a fan of Apples iPad you would have to be living in the New Guinea jungle not to have heard of it by now. With consistent sales of 4.5 million units a quarter it is likely to surpass the DVD player as the most successful electronics product of all time.

Why is this important? Some were along the line Steve Jobs (Apple’s CEO) has decided that his “revolutionary device” would not be supporting Flash.

If you website contains anything that requires a Flash plug-in, this content cannot be vied on the iPad (or the iPhone/iPod Touch either). As these devices are becoming a standard way for people to be accessing the internet it is probably time to start moving away from Flash based websites. Features that used to require the use of Flash can now be just as easily implemented using standards basted technologies in particular Java script. Browser manufactures put a lot of effort in to getting excellent Java script performance in to their products so this functionality is getting better with each new browser release at the moment.

As well as lack of support on many new devices Flash makes it hard for search engines to index your site because the text based content that they rely on is locked away in a proprietary format that can’t be parsed for key words.

So there are many great reasons to move away from Flash. Hosting-Group is advising all our new customers to implement a more web standards based solution. If you have an existing web site that is reliant on Flash it’s defiantly time to think about updating your web site.