Why do restaurant owners love Flash so much that their entire Web sites are in Flash? Don’t get me wrong, I love Flash and I make a living selling Flash movies, branding areas, yada, yada. But most Web sites should not be all Flash!
Here’s an example of an all Flash site that is annoying and borderline useless. I was scheduling lunch with a friend, who asked me to recommend a restaurant and send him the physical and Web addresses. No problem, right? Wrong.
Check out the Web site for Kora in Crystal City – http://www.korarestaurant.com/ The Web site is pretty, but if you’re trying to get an address and send it to a friend, it’s not user-friendly at all!
- It took me 5 minutes to find the address. It’s not on the home page, nor under Hours and Directions. It’s under Contact Us and Reservations.
- Because the site is entirely in Flash, I couldn’t copy the address and paste into the e-mail I was sending my friend.
- I also could not copy and paste the address into Google maps so that I could send my friend directions from Reston.
- Forget being able to bookmark specific pages because the URL never changes in the single Flash file for the entire site. So I couldn’t send my friend the URL of a menu page. Aaaargh.
- Oh yeah, you can’t print Flash pages either unless print-friendly pages have been specifically created; most designers don’t bother. So if you want to print Kora’s Hours and Directions page, you’re out of luck.
Since I’m lazy and did not want to re-type the address, I simply went to Google, typed “Kora Arlington, VA” and got a link to a map and directions from Google maps. God bless Google.
I’m sure Kora paid good money for its beautiful, all Flash site, but I bet it’s a pain to update and it’s not very accommodating for visitors who just want to copy and paste an address. Good grief!
How about you? Got your own rants against an all Flash site? Post links and comments!
