Why do Mexican Web Designers love Flash?
Why is it that Mexican web designers feel compelled to use so much Flash on their web sites? It drives me nuts. They often think nothing of putting entire pages in Flash. Are they allergic to plain text? Are they THAT naive about the accessibility and usability problems associated with Flash? In a country where most people can’t afford a computer they expect that everyone who visits their site will have the Flash player installed? Do they care that little about page load times or whether their sites indexed properly by search engines?
Take, for example, the web site for the radio show “Mexico Today“. The whole page is Flash, you can’t even select the blog entry text. I tried Googling for the show and, not surprisingly, I couldn’t find it.
The very liberal newspaper “La Jornada” is a little better, at least the arcticle text is actually text. But this morning when I visited it the home page had no less than 7 Flash movies, all of which were moving. Even one moving thing on a page is enough to scare away some users. Personally I find all that movement completely distracts me from actually reading the content. And on top of that the page is slow to load.
The purpose of a web page is to provide something that the user needs; so the user’s experience of the page should be of paramount importance. It should not be about web designer’s Flash abilities, it should be about the users!
