On Monday MTV switched from a strictly flash-based website to an “html” version. The look and feel is a lot like a YouTube or any other Web 2.0 site that’s out there. The interesting thing is that they ever went with a primarily flash-based design in the first place. Most designers with minimal experience know you should not use flash to develop an entire website and they are familiar with the reasons why.

There is an article on Jeff Hendrickson design (great blog btw, subscribe to the RSS) titled “The Case Against Flash” that sums it up pretty nicely. The key points:

• Flash is a plugin: users will have to install it to see your content.
• Flash is slow to load: users want their content when they want it, not 27 seconds after clicking a link.
• Flash is often unnecessary: unless you’re designing a game or short movie or advanced web-based application you don’t need flash for sounds and animations.
• Flash breaks the standard browser use pattern: right clicking and back buttons don’t produce the same results in flash as they do on standard pages.
• Flash can’t be craweld: search engines have a hard (if not impossible) time with flash.

The interesting thing here is that MTV went with the flash design in the first place. One would think that somewhere along the pre-development process someone would have pointed to the fact that flash is expensive to design and maintain and that with AJAX there are better, more user-friendly ways to accomplish the same things flash allowed you to do four or five years ago. I can only venture a guess at how much some webdesign firm took from MTV, not to mention the related costs of converting the site back to standard pages.