Today John Sullivan has a good post about strategies for websites for AEC firms. He makes a number of really good points. The first is diminish the use of Flash. I could not agree more. We know a few things about this. We have over 10 years experience building websites for AEC firms. We just finished re-building a website for Perkins Eastman Architects. We built a dynamic animation of Images on the home page. We used javascript animaion and NOT Flash. As a result, the page loads much faster. We did use a tiny bit of flash for the text which overlays the photos, but there is no “loading screen” which takes 1 minute. The more modern browsers can do almost all the Flash efects using javascrit and HTML. You just have to have a programmers who knows how.
And not for a shameless plug – Perkins is powering thier entire site using the Cosential Website Content engine. We have just finished a public API using a webservide to access this. All of this means that most any designer or website agency can hook up an AEC firm website to our content engine. The advantage is that The Cosential CM Engine is built precisely for project based firms. It requires no programming or customization. We will have a new product page for this shortly.
