March 16th 2001 | Scott Manning

Selling Flash to Your Customers - It’s the Practicalities That Make the Sale

You are free lance web designer who specializes in Flash. You've been doing sites for a while now and you seem to always come across the same problem with some of your customers: I don't need to use any Flash in my site. For whatever reason they may have, it usually boils down to a misunderstanding about Flash. This article will give you some tips and advice on how to market the idea of using Flash to your customers.

I've been designing websites for some time now. I have fallen in love with using Flash to do my sites. Let's face it:
Other than all of its practicalities, Flash is just fun to use. The sites are more impressive and invoke more creativity than a plain old HTML site. So naturally, I try to sell my Flash services above anything else. I have found that my customers do not always share this enthusiasm for Flash and it is usually because of several superstitions that people have about the power and user-friendly nature of Flash. Our responsibility as web designers to our potential customers is to clear up these misconceptions.

Misconception One: Not everyone has Flash, so people will go to my site and see nothing.
This is the main objection that I hear. Website owners are scared to death of losing business. It would cause their company to look unreliable to have a customer go to their site and not be able to access the information they are searching for.

The first thing you should tell them is that 96% of Internet users currently have Flash. With a statistic like that, you cannot go wrong. This will appease much of their apprehensions about Flash, but there is still that 4% that could be missing out. Continue by explaining that there are several simple ways to deal with this 4%. You, as a Flash designer, can put Flash detection on the index page to determine whether or not they have Flash. If they have Flash, then the detection page sends them to the Flash version of the website automatically. If they do not have Flash capacities, then there are two ways of serving them: By sending them to a page to download Flash (which takes less than one minute on a 56K modem), or by routing them to an HTML version of the same website. Either way, the web user will not be hindered from viewing the site.

Misconception Two: People are not willing to wait for the long downloads.
I have had those customers that would rather have an animated gif as opposed to a Flash. They believe that you should only use Flash when absolutely necessary. The problem is that many people just don't understand the necessity of Flash. An animated gif can be three times as big as the same animation done in Flash. Not only that, but the Flash will have much better quality. In this instance, you have to demonstrate to them how Flash would actually be a smaller download.

We're going to consider that the customer in this situation is not one needing some online gaming site with massive sounds and movie clips. This is just a guy with a business that is trying to get on the Internet. His understanding that Flash takes too long to download comes from that last time he went to shockwave.com and tried to watch a South Park Episode. It took him about ten minutes on his 56K modem. Understanding this point of view, you as the designer, need to help him assess his needs. Basically, how big will this site be in HTML and how big will it be in Flash?

Something I have found useful to do is to give the customer an estimated download time. One of my recent customers wanted a Flash intro. After explaining to me what he wanted, he wasn't sure if it was worth the download time. I told him that the Flash intro would be about 90 K, which would take less than thirty seconds to download on a 56K.

Thirty seconds does not sound long and he went for the intro. An easy rule of thumb to use is that 200 K takes less than a minute on a 56K to download. Depending on the Flash size, you can do some quick figuring that will allow your potential customer to see how rapidly it will load.

Misconception Three: Flash should always be a last resort because of editing time.
I was recently part of a team doing a redesign for an online bookstore. While working with the customer and other designers on the bookstore, there came some disagreement over the navigation bar for the site. What the designers had in place was a JavaScript that had book categories. When you clicked on a category, the entire page reloaded to display the books in that category. The JavaScript was on each page and was about 30K in size. If you wanted to add a book or change a link, you had to update each page. I saw this as a potential nightmare.

I suggested creating the same navigation bar in Flash. It would be about 20 K in size, it would only need to load once, it would not reload the entire page when you clicked on a category, and you would only need to update it once when a change was made. With all those positives, everyone still had their doubts. It basically came down to, â€œOkay, Flash guy. Show me.â€

That's exactly what I did. They played with the bar. I then told them to tell me to change something. Anything. They asked me to change a few links. I had it done in less than a minute, whereas it would have taken them over an hour. They were quite impressed and the Flash is currently embedded in all the pages of the site. You can see an example at: http://www.seedsowers.com/books.html

We all know that Flash has a ton of bells and whistles that look great on websites, but I have found that it's the practical aspects of Flash that make the sale.

Even with all the incredible statistics, sometimes people are not convinced and need to see a demonstration of capability. If you do this in a way that shows others how Flash will save everyone time and energy, fellow designers and customers will be grateful in the end and you will build a portfolio worthy of any Flash connoisseur.