Wellfire Interactive

Virgin America, aviation child of billionaire marketing genius Richard Branson, relaunched its website this week. And it ditched Flash.

As reported in The Register yesterday:

It illustrates the options customers have between picking the closed Flash - or Silverlight from Microsoft - and open technologies such as HTML to serve content to a new generation of mobile computing devices.

Virgin picked HTML to give users of iPhones and other mobiles the option in the future of checking in through their phone. The battle between Adobe and Apple has seen Flash deliberately excluded from the Jesus Phone.

Chief information officer (CTO) Ravi Simhambhatla told The Reg: "I don't want to cater to one hardware or one software platform one way to another, and Flash eliminates iPhone users. This year is going to be the year of the mobile [for Virgin]."

What this means for website owners

Flash has lately been made out as a boogeyman by many web designers and developers, somewhat unfairly. Virgin America ditched the closed, proprietary graphics platform in favor of something that will run on a closed, proprietary device. But what matters most is your audience, and how it accesses your content.

Most sites using Flash are using it in instances where it is plain unnecessary, and they are blocking audience access. If your audience is using mobile devices or screen readers then you're shutting them down. 

Flash (and Silverlight, if you're so inclined) do have their uses, especially for creating interactive modules for which HTML isn't cut out. But not for delivering content. The only thing worse than trying to browse through an all-Flash site is trying to browse through an all-Flash site for information that's stuck in PDF files. 

To paraphrase KRS-One: 

Yo this is, the message, to all that can hear it
If you got [web content] information now's the time to share it

We've got HTML for a reason. Use it!