In general terms, when building a website, designers take one of two paths: make the site in XHTML/CSS/JS or make it entirely in Flash. It is pretty clear we usually take the XHTML/CSS/JS route and use Flash only to add touches here and there.

Our rule of the thumb is something I read a while ago in a website: Flash shouldn’t be used for things you can achieve with XHTML/CSS/JS. I can’t remember where I read it, but I do know that since I did, it has been my weapon of choice whenever a client insists on Flash. There are many things that XHTML/CSS/JS can’t do and this is why we have Flash.

So, what are the most common mistakes Flash designers make according to Ahlera’s philosophy?

1. Intros that cannot be skipped

This is, by far, one of the most annoying things that have ever happened to web design. Flash designers take a long time to make these intros and they’re so proud of them that they actually force the visitor to look at it just to show off their mad Flash skills.

I guess it never occurred to the designer that people don’t come to a website to look at intros. They come to gather information and the designer’s flash intro is getting in their way.

It is bad enough that the site has a Flash intro. Don’t make matters worse by not providing a way to skip it. This is one of the worst things you can do to a website and to its visitors. Not providing a way to skip the intro does not help anyone, not even the designer, even though he might think that his intro is so hot people HAVE to see it.

2. Music

The year is 2009. I’m pretty sure most people have a media player and MP3s in their computer and generally listen to them while browsing the web. Why would the designer want to interrupt the music of their choice with the music of his choice?

It is very likely that if the visitor is not already listening to music it is because he doesn’t want to or because he can’t. We as designers and developers should respect their desire.

People share spaces with coworkers and it is very annoying for everyone when music suddenly comes on. To make matters worse, some websites do not even have the option to mute the sound or have hid it very well within the design.

Unless you’re Pandora, people don’t come to the site to listen to music. They come to gather information and the music is getting in the way.

3. Cryptic navigation

This is one of the things that puzzles me the most. I simply cannot find a logical explanation as to why anyone would want to encrypt their navigation menu. Why would you want the visitor to not be able to find his way around?

Imagine you went to a zoo because you want to see kangaroos and all the signs are written in Klingon. Sure, this is OK for some Star Wars geeks, but for every one else it is annoying, especially if all you want to see are kangaroos and get out of there.

This is a navigation menu I saw this morning:

This type of navigation encryption is not cool at all. It forces the visitor to click on everything to get to where he wants to go. Some designers add a rollover to these things which is definitely better than nothing, but the bottom line is that navigation is one of the most important things of a website and it should be as clear as possible, unless you’re making a website for hardcore Lost fans.

Even though these mistakes can be made by people who choose not to work with Flash, they are most comonly found among Flash-based designs. It is not wrong to build websites based on Flash, but in our opinion Flash should only be used when you need to do things that cannot be done in XHTML.

Last year I posted a note regarding data safety and how backups are crucial to maintaining your data’s safety.

I also talked about two things that could happen to make your server go missing: police raids (The Pirate Bay) and spontaneous combustion (electrical fires). Well, I don’t want to toot my own horn here, but the whole police raid scenario repeated itself, this time in Dallas.

The FBI pretty much raided an entire datacenter and seized everything because one of the hundreds of servers was involved in the distribution of a pirated movie, leaving hundreds of other innocent clients without their websites, email, etc. This datacenter’s clients includes telecom companies and this raid caused 911 services to be down for some of them. So, if the FBI doesn’t care about something as crucial as 911 services, why should they care about your data?

Read the entire statement written by Matthew Simpson, CEO of Core IP Networks, right here.

So, backup your data! Really.

Today’s entry is of extreme importance.  It is about data safety.

A lot of people call us up and ask about the cost of making a website.  We almost always start out by saying that they will need two things before talking to us: hosting and a domain.  They’re usually surprised about the hosting part.  For some reason they seem to assume that we can actually host their website.

Why don’t we offer a hosting service?  Because we’re not engineers or system administrators.  We design websites and develop web applications.  That is our area of expertise. We do not have the preparation or the experience to take responsibility for fixing stuff on a Linux server when things break.  Because of this, we cannot assure the safety and continuity of our client’s data in a server.

This is a room full of people at most web design studios that are ready to help you should something serious happen to your server

What we can do at Ahlera is build robust applications and websites that interact with stuff installed in the server to obtain results, as long as the server itself is up and running. That bold part is the hard part to guarantee by a design studio.

I can think of two cases right now that will serve as good examples of this.  Six years ago I lost a server with several personal projects because it simply caught fire. I was hosting with a top company and the datacenter had all sorts of fire, intrusion, and flood security, but it happened.

What major Internet-related event took place in May 2006? If you’re addicted to tech news like us, you’d know that this was the month were The Pirate Bay’s servers were raided by Swedish police.  They pretty much came in and seized servers, routers, cables, harddrives, and other important stuff.  The problem is that those servers didn’t only contain data from The Pirate Bay; they also contained data for dozens of other clients of the same hosting company that had unquestionably legal content on it.  People that had nothing to do with The Pirate Bay (other than hosting with a company that has strong ties to it) saw their sites offline for a couple of days.  For someone who does business primarily on the Internet, “a couple of days” can be a lot more costly than you think.

There’s a variety of possible scenarios of things that can go wrong at hosting companies.  I just thought of two extreme cases, but think of the hundreds of simpler ones that I didn’t mention that could happen any given day.

Right now we’re developing and app for a client that needs two servers with two different configurations.  We planned the server specs based on our little app and helped in the hosting company selection process, but our client knows that our responsibility only goes as far our application. We guarantee our application and will fix any bug in it, but if those servers break, catch fire, or simply disappear, he has to call the hosting company.  Of course that we’ll help him out with what we can, as we’ve done many times, but he knows that we are not responsible for it.

If you have a design studio that offers hosting and don’t have a system admin on payroll, you should ask yourself the following questions:

• Does my client know and understand my responsibility limits?
• Do I have a signed document from my client stating that he knows my limits?
• Do I make remote nightly backups of every email, database, log, and other file that belongs to my client should RAID1 fail?
• Am I in a position to withstand going to court if a client loses all the data he’s hosting with me?

If you’re a client that hosts with the same people that made your website maybe you should call them up and ask them the following:

• Do you have backups of all my data, including emails, databases, logs, and other files on a server other than my own?  There’s no point in keeping a backup in the same computer for obvious reasons.
• How often do you make these backups?
• If something bad were to happen right now and all data on the live server was lost, how long would it take to have me back up and running?

Web design and hosting are two completely different things.  They are almost as different as apples and oranges.

We hope that this helps both clients and studios realize the importance of data and why it is best to let real engineers handle it.