Sometimes it’s really easy to overlook the simple things when it comes to design. It’s really easy to get caught up in the idea of making your site as flashy as humanly possible to draw in potential visitors; just look at the early 2000s explosion of people using Flash as a design element rather than a content embed. Swift animations and hyper-interactivity have their place, but when you rely almost solely on it, it can be at best distracting and at worst dizzying. Thankfully that trend has seemed to have plateaued a bit, as people are no longer impressed by frill alone on the Internet; we see plenty of it every day. Some sites–even stranger, some entire GENRES of sites, especially for some reason restaurant sites, shoe sites, and car sites–are still caught in the old-world mentality of more Flash = better content. And that couldn’t be further from the truth.

If you read The Oatmeal, you are probably familiar with one of his comics which portray this problem perfectly (And if you don’t read The Oatmeal, you should. It’s awesome.):

A Flash in the pan
Here is the problem. 99% of the time I go to a restaurant’s site, I want to know one of three things: Where it is, what they serve, and if it’s any good. What I’m NOT looking for is a loading bar that takes 3 minutes to load the Flash, pointless animation, blaring, auto-starting music and impossible to navigate menus. And sadly, that’s all I seem to get. For instance, look at this website for a restaurant/wine bar in Sacramento. What the hell is going on here? I’m not sure ANYONE in the world says to themselves, “Man, I really hope this site I’m about to go to starts playing music loudly and automatically!”, let alone the pretentious, swanky auditory vomit spewing from this website. I didn’t go to this site to watch a cork zip around the screen; I came here to learn about your food. Which is really one of the basics of not just web design, but any design: Design for your audience. Sites like these fail to do so.

For some reason shoe websites seem to be plagued by the same issue. Take for instance Converse’s website. Why do I need to battle a bout of vertigo every time I go to click on a link? There is such a huge difference between what is technically impressive and what is aesthetically pleasing. And this disconnect happens unfortunately much more often than it should. Web design shouldn’t be an epeen contest of how long the site took to develop, how many languages were necessary and how much processing power it requires; it should be about what looks good, and what is easily usable. Usability is really the most important thing here.

In defense of mobile
The other major problem that designers didn’t have to seriously worry about ten or even five years ago is the mobile market. Flash doesn’t work on iOS, Windows Phone 7 and most Android devices. On the few mobile devices Flash does work on, it’s clunky, slow, and battery consuming to a crippling degree. A lot of people will just disregard mobile, and that’s a huge mistake. I surf the web probably more on my iPhone than I do on my Mac nowadays, and I know I’m not alone in that. I find it especially ironic that restaurant websites are such major offenders of Flash overuse, since most of the time I’m going to a restaurant’s website, I’m out and about, on my phone, wondering “What should we eat?”.

Oh well, thank god for Yelp.

Say it with me, guys: Design with your audience in mind. Design with your audience in mind. Design with your audience in mind. Design with your audience in mind. Design with your audience in mind. Good. Now that you’ve felt my pain, the healing can begin.