Today Adobe announced on their blog (Wayback Machine link): Flash is dead. It wasn’t quite that dramatic, but they did announce the development of a Flash player for mobile devices has been nixed. What does this mean for the small business website?
If you are a small business who has a website created exclusively in Flash, it means your site will continue to be invisible on smart phones, pads and other mobile devices. (see my 2008 post “Flash: Is It the Web’s Invisibility Cloak?”). All the hot smartphones like the iPhone and Blackberry and all the new pads do not have a Flash player and it looks like with Adobe’s announcement they will never have one. If a small business has a Flash site and wants to be seen on the growing number of mobile devices, they must convert their site to HTML or HTML5.
Yes, Flash will live on because it still has useful applications. It’s a good program for building games. It can handle complex web functions: Steve Shankland on the CNET.com news blog pointed out that Flash is used to upload multiple file attachments in Gmail. Games and advanced functions are seldom part of a small business website.
My advice remains the same as in the past: whether starting a new small business website or to reclaim your visibility on the web—limit the use of Flash and be seen online!
