Broadband migration isn’t fully saturated. As much as it pains me to say this, not everyone has switched to Broadband. I was working on a PC owned by a friend, and was disheartened to find that she only had 56k connection speeds. When I asked her why, she responded, “All I need to do is check my e-mail, and occasionally visit a website.” I then proceeded to cry internally because I had to access sites with embedded Flash files. Needless to say, I made a sandwich while waiting.

Search Engine Optimization. If your knowledge of SEO doesn’t span the Crystal Desert, don’t worry. You’re not alone. I’m not an SEO expert either, but I think we can all agree that Google is the end-all to almost anything “web”. Flash’s end-product (.swf) cannot be read by Google’s crawler, a tool used to scan websites and place pages further up the list based off linking and keywords.

Flash is pretty when done right. This may seem like a positive, but, as always, ‘something’s gotta give’. You can’t get the crisp and smooth animations without making the file size bigger, thus, increasing loading time amongst users trying to access your content.

iDevices. 80% of tablet users own an iPad. 30% of smartphone users own an iPhone. Let’s face it. You or someone you know owns an iDevice. Regardless of what you think about Apple and their mobile devices, they have just about dominated the market, even without Flash capability. A client of ours claims she never uses her computer, but uses her iPhone to do the bulk of her work. It’s almost foolish to not consider these users as part of your target market.

As always, cater to the consumer, the end-user. Think of what people would want to see when visiting a webpage. Think of how fast they want to see it.

Think of you.