A Bakery Site That Opens With a Flash Intro

The site

A family bakery on a small town's main street: bread every day, pastries in the morning, pies at weekends and custom cakes to order. Its website was built several years ago and has barely changed.

Type in the address and the screen turns cream. A loading bar fills, then an animation plays: flour falling, dough rising, a loaf sliding from the oven, the bakery's name written in gold script. Music plays throughout.

In the bottom corner, in small grey type inside the animation, is a link reading Skip intro. Clicking it, or waiting about twenty seconds, leads to a second page with the menu, hours and phone number.

The animation was the most expensive part of the site, and the family is fond of it.

The inference a visitor makes

A regular customer wants to know whether the bakery opens on a holiday Monday. She types the address on her phone and gets a blank page, or a message asking her to install a player.

She calls if she has the number, or drives past to look. A visitor from out of town, hunting for a birthday cake, simply picks another bakery whose site opened.

On a computer the inference is milder but still there. The site looks like it belongs to another decade, and a visitor wonders whether the hours inside it are still right.

Neither visitor tells the bakery. The owners only notice that the phone rings with questions the site should have answered.

What the intro stands in front of

A Flash intro was a common way to open a site when this one was built. Today it stands between almost every visitor and the facts they came for:

• Phones and tablets, which show nothing where the animation should be.
• Google, which finds almost no words on the front page.
• Regular customers, who wait or hunt for the skip link on every visit.
• Office visitors, whose speakers suddenly play music.
• Anyone sharing the site, whose link arrives without a useful preview.

The first matters most, because so many people now look up a local shop on a phone, often on the way there.

Nothing at all on iPhones and iPads

iPhones and iPads have never run Flash. Where the animation should be, they show an empty space or a prompt to download a player that does not exist for them.

Most newer Android phones and tablets cannot run it either. Because the skip link is drawn inside the animation, it disappears with it, and the intro page becomes a dead end.

The menu, hours and phone number all sit on the second page, so a phone visitor never reaches any of them.

Almost nothing for Google to read

Google can read some text inside Flash files, but an intro is mostly pictures and movement, and the bakery's name in gold script is drawn shapes rather than letters.

The page holding the animation has almost no words of its own. When Google lists the site, the description under the link is often the only text it found: Skip intro.

The home page is usually the page other sites link to most, and here it says nothing about bread, cakes or the town.

A wait on every visit

The animation file must download before it plays. On a slow connection, the loading bar can take longer than the animation itself.

Regular customers come for one thing, usually the hours or the cake order form, and the intro makes them wait or find the skip link every time. Nothing remembers that they have seen it before.

The music adds to it. Someone checking the hours at work or in a quiet house hears it before finding a way to turn it off.

A link that shares badly

When a customer posts the bakery's address on Facebook, the preview looks for a title, a description and an image on the page. The intro page offers a title at most.

The shared link arrives as the bakery's name with no description and no picture, which gives a friend little reason to click. A customer recommending the bakery, its best advertising, loses its picture and its words.

LinkedIn and other sites that build previews from the page find the same emptiness.

A worked example

A family bakery in an Okanagan town heard about its intro from a customer who tried to order a cake on her phone and found only a white screen.

The owners opened the site on two phones and a tablet, then searched for the bakery by name. The phones showed nothing, and Google's description under the link read Skip intro.

The intro was removed, and the second page became the home page. It now opens with the hours, the address with a map, the phone number and what is baked on which days.

Custom cakes got their own page, with sizes, flavours, starting prices, the notice needed and a short order form.

The new layout is responsive, so phones get a version built for them, and the words are real text that Google can read. A photograph of the morning's loaves replaced the animation.

The facts customers came for are now the first thing every device shows, and Google has the bakery's own words to show under its name.

The counter-case within the site

The animation is not worthless. It shows the bakery's character, the family paid for it, and some customers remember it fondly.

Its problem is where it sits. In front of the hours it blocks everyone; on a page about the bakery's history, it can be enjoyed by people who chose to watch it.

If it is worth keeping, have it converted into a short video that phones can play, with sound off until the visitor starts it. The home page still belongs to the hours, the address and the bread.

What to change

1. Open your site on an iPhone and an iPad.
2. Search for the business and read the description.
3. Remove the intro from the front of the site.
4. Put hours, address and phone at the top of the home page.
5. Give custom orders their own page and form.
6. Turn off music that plays on arrival.
7. Keep the animation, if wanted, as a video on an inner page.

Step one takes two minutes and settles the argument. Once owners have seen their own site as a blank page on a phone, the case for keeping the intro at the front usually falls away.

Another old technology that leaves visitors facing an empty box, a booking calendar built as a Java applet that browsers now block, is taken apart in a whale watching site whose booking runs in a Java applet.

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