Why Does Inertial Zen Designs avoid designing using Flash?

Adobe's Flash software, for the longest time, was the go to platform for designing interactive and non-interactive content in Website Design projects.  However times are changing and Inertial Zen Designs tries to avoid using Flash as much as possible, choosing to favour elements of HTML 5 and CSS 3 instead.

As a potential client with Inertial Zen Designs, you may be wondering why this is the case, and as such please allow us to present our top 5 reasons as to why Inertial Zen Designs prefers to not use this platform.

1.Flash Platform Security issues
In March of 2013, Apple took the step to block older versions of Adobe Flash on computers running OSX citing security risks. Part of this is due to Malware that can spoof Flash upgrade requests.  Where this can work against you and your Website is that customers can actually think that the problems from other site's malware may be caused by the Flash content on your Website.

2. Flash works against your Site's ability to be Optimized for Search Engines
Lets face it, one of the most important details you want for your Company's Website is to have it come up at the top of Google/Bing's search results.  Flash works against you in this aspect as the Spiders that index the World Wide Web can not read Flash, so the more content you have embedded in the Flash wrapper the less content is working in your favour when it comes to indexing.

3. Future Updating of your Website
Lets say you decide to change one colour in the logo of your Company's website and you want that colour to flow through your existing Website.  With a CSS /HTML Website this change is actually fairly easy to do,usually through the change of one Hexadecimal colour code.  With a site coded in Flash, the entire site has to be re-rendered, every page has to be taken into software and physically have the changes made in every spot that requires the change.

4. Half the Mobile Market does not support Flash
In the mobile computing world, there is a constant back and forth shift between which platform dominates between Apple's iOS and Google's Android Platforms.  One of the selling points Google has positioned their platform on is that Android supports Flash, However Apple does not, and with more users going to Mobile Computing solutions, do you really want to risk alienating half of your potential audience due to lack of processing of content?

5.Adobe themselves is Killing Flash (so far at least on Mobile sites)
Lets face it, how much do you want to back a fighter when it's own cornermen have thrown in the Towel? That specifically is what Adobe did last November when they announced that, at least on Mobile Platforms, they would no longer be developing new versions of Flash Player, the exception to this being security upgrades.

But as covered in Point 4, half of the Mobile Computing Market does not support Flash anyway.  On Desktop systems, Google has moved forward with their own installed Flash plugin called "Pepper flash", however that is but one browser and the question has to be asked just how much longer the global market will continue to support Adobe's animation tool when even sites like Youtube are moving in the HTML5 direction.

And that is Five reasons why Inertial Zen Designs tends to design Website projects without Flash elements when ever possible