OK – so things are busy.

Damned busy. You know they (whoever they are) say “it never rains but it pours”, well at the moment I’m delighted to say we’re seemingly stepping into monsoon season. That’s why I think it’s time to be realistic with myself. Because whilst it might not show it, writing blog posts often takes me ages. Certainly far too long considering what else I should/could be doing and the number of early morning finishes I’m currently clocking up most weeks. But it’s good to talk. I certainly believe it’s good to blog, because it’s good to keep people up to date with what we’re up to (well, my Mum at least), so perhaps it’s time to change the way I use this ‘ere particular web 2.0 (does using that expression date me?) medium and see if that works better.

So I’m going to try and keep it succinct. I’m gonna TRY OK? No promises, but lets see.

For starters a pop quiz. I’ve just come off a call to a prospective customer. The technology of the web meeting didn’t go so well TBH, but we muddled through. Anyway – the feedback on our core product (HARBOUR ATS) was very encouraging. This person had been using a “leading global talent management software” facility in their previous role as well as having undertaken a very extensive ATS provider market assessment a year or two ago. So see if you can spot which comments related to HARBOUR ATS and which the other product(s):

• “Wow, I love it”
• “Clearly execution is informed by good digital principles, which is refreshing to see”
• “Love the intuitiveness”
• “It looks sh*t”
• “Streets ahead of anything [sic. other ATS'] that I’ve seen”

And for an extra bonus point – see if you can tell me which other ATS a soon to be announced customer was describing when they said that “using it is like rolling over a corpse to try and find a candidate”.

No prizes – all for fun – but answers on a postcard please

This came up today in a little back and forth on Twitter & got me so agitated that I wanted to air it here too. The micro debate centred around the use of Flash (or at least the exclusive use of flash) in website builds.

Now firstly let me say that I’m a Flash fan and for a long time have been in awe of the experience you can get through flash sites. It annoys me that I can’t see them on my iPhone (nor could I if I had an iPad – but I don’t, so “whatever”), but at the same time I understand that we can’t always have everything on every platform (until HTML5 is here and everyone moves to that of course

In my day I have produced and overseen my fair share of Flash site builds – even Flash exclusive sites (about 8years ago I was responsible for building a multi award winning site for Codemasters where the target audience was Game Developers & the like – so if they didn’t have a decent internet connection speed and Flash then that was a pretty effective first sift criteria to fail). So if you’re confident that the target audience are absolutely going to have the set up to access the site and you don’t care about considering accessibility or SEO (both of which flash comprehensively fails at) then fill your boots.

But what REALLY pissed me off was a cross the bow shot of Adobe statistics (see them here). If you have a cursory look it’s pretty damned impressive. As of June 2010:

Flash player 8 & below has penetrated 99.7% of all PCs in Europe

Flash player 10 has penetrated 97.9% of all PCs in Europe

Now that’s all massively impressive. Until you have a little scratch into the methodology. Have a guess how many people they asked? Bear in mind that the UK has an estimated 46.5m people with internet access. (France 42.3m; Germany 61.9m). So go on – how many you reckon? out of a user base of 150.7million people?

1,050

No – not 1,050 in the UK. 1,050 in “Europe” (350 in each of the 3 countries that makes up Europe. Italians don’t have the Internet do they?). That’s, I reckon, a sample size of 0.0006%.

FFS – this is one of the worlds foremost software providers conducting research to try prove their global reach across the web. And they gathered responses from 350 people in the UK to give us a 99.7% figure. 350 people who I daresay are about as representative of the wider UK user as I am of 8stone females in their 20s named Alex. But that’s a whole other story.

So build sites in flash. Make them beautiful & engaging. Bask in smoothness, trickery and utilise all the cleverness Flash allows. But don’t justify your approach (to yourself or your clients) based on a user reach that is effectively not much better than made up data.

BTW – in a study this afternoon 100% of people thought my opinion in this matter was spot on. *

*I asked 4 people and my dog