Chrome now blocks Flash by default and phones cannot run it, so a Flash gallery shows most visitors an empty box. Rebuild it as ordinary project pages with photographs, captions and text every browser can show.

The site

A renovation company that specialises in older houses: additions, second storeys and whole-house renovations of homes built in the fifties and sixties. Twelve people, two crews, most jobs within half an hour of the office.

The website dates from about 2009 and moved to a mobile-friendly theme in 2015. Five pages of text and a contact form came across cleanly; the Projects page was carried over untouched.

The Projects page holds the company's best work: about forty jobs in a Flash gallery, with fading transitions, a strip of thumbnails and a caption for each photograph.

On most visitors' screens this month, it is an empty box with an old badge in the middle: Get Adobe Flash Player.

What visitors actually see

Chrome 76, released at the end of July, blocks Flash by default. Running it now means finding a setting and allowing this site specifically, which almost nobody shopping for a renovation will do.

The last is the only case where the work might appear. Everyone looking from home, on a phone or a current browser, sees the box.

The inference a visitor makes

Letting a company take the roof off the house is a large act of trust, and the visitor wants proof. They have read the services page; now they want to see the work.

They open Projects and find an empty box. The menu says projects, the page title says projects, and there are none.

The conclusion is rarely that a browser blocked something. It is that the company has nothing to show, or that its site is broken and nobody has noticed, which says something about how it might run a job.

Either way, the visitor moves to the next name on the list, whose site shows a finished addition on the first screen.

A badge that looks like a trick

The box is worse than empty, because the badge asks the visitor to download a player.

For years, people have been told that pop-ups urging them to install a player or an update are a common way of spreading malware. A badge like that, on a site they do not know, looks exactly like one.

So the one thing the page asks the visitor to do is the thing they have been warned never to do. The careful ones leave.

Work that search engines cannot read

The captions in the gallery are good: the street, the year, what was done. They live inside the Flash file, where search engines have always read text poorly, if at all.

To Google, the page holding the company's best evidence is a page called Projects with almost no words on it.

A search for a second storey addition in the company's own area finds other companies' project pages, written in plain text, and never this one.

One address for forty projects

The whole gallery sits at one address. There is no way to send a link to a single job, the way a homeowner might send one to a spouse or a neighbour.

The staff cannot do it either. When a prospective client asks to see a similar addition, the estimator tells them to open the gallery and click through to number twenty-three.

A project with a page of its own can be found, sent and linked. A frame inside a Flash file cannot.

Frozen in 2011

The newest project in the gallery is from 2011. Updating it needed the original authoring software and the designer who built it, and neither has been around for years.

So eight years of the company's work, including its largest additions, appear nowhere on the site.

Even a visitor who gets the gallery running sees nothing newer than 2011, which sends its own message.

A worked example

The company found out from a client. A couple referred by a former customer mentioned at the first meeting that they had wanted to see the work, but the website showed nothing.

The gallery, it turned out, read its photographs from a folder on the server, listed in a small text file, as many Flash galleries of that era did. All forty jobs' photographs were still there.

They were small by current standards, so the owner's originals replaced them where they existed, and the office added a selection of jobs from the last eight years.

Each project became a page of its own: a title saying what was done and where, a paragraph about the house and the work, the time on site, and eight to twelve captioned photographs.

The Projects page became an index of those pages, one photograph each, grouped into additions, second storeys and whole-house work.

The Flash file and the badge were deleted, and the old gallery page's address now redirects to the new index, so links to it still work.

The counter-case within the site

Some visitors on older office machines may still see the gallery. That is no reason to keep it: the group is shrinking, and Adobe ends Flash altogether at the end of 2020.

The replacement does not need to be elaborate. A plain grid of photographs leading to plain project pages works in every browser, which no animated gallery can promise.

And the rest of this site is sound: the theme works on phones, the services are well described and the form works. Here, one section needs rebuilding properly.

An older site whose other pages have aged as badly is usually better rebuilt as a whole.

Replace the gallery with ordinary pages and photographs, and the company's best evidence reaches the people looking for it.

What to change

  1. Load the projects page on a phone and in Chrome.
  2. List every Flash element still on the site.
  3. Recover the photographs from the server or originals.
  4. Give each project a page of its own.
  5. Write a caption for every photograph.
  6. Delete the Flash file and the download badge.
  7. Redirect the old gallery address to the new index.

Step four is what lets the work travel. A project with its own page can be found in search, sent to a neighbour and linked from the service it belongs to.

Finding any other Flash still on a site is covered in Flash is now blocked by default in Chrome.

Frequently asked questions

What does a Flash gallery look like now?

In Chrome, which blocks Flash by default from version 76, an empty box. On phones, an old badge asking for Flash Player, which phones cannot run.

Why not just ask visitors to enable Flash?

Almost nobody choosing a renovation company will change browser settings to see a gallery, and a prompt to install a player looks like a common malware trick.

Can search engines read a Flash gallery?

Poorly, if at all. The captions and project details inside the Flash file are largely invisible, so the page looks to Google like a title with almost no text.

Where do the original photographs come from?

Many Flash galleries read their photographs from a folder on the server, so they may still be there. Replace small ones with originals from the company's own files.

What should replace the gallery?

A page for each project, with a descriptive title, a paragraph about the house and the work, and captioned photographs, plus an index grouping the projects by type.

Is it worth keeping for visitors who still have Flash?

No. That group is shrinking, Adobe ends Flash at the end of 2020, and ordinary pages with photographs work in every browser, including theirs.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Your best work locked inside Flash?

Send us the address. We will recover the photographs and rebuild the gallery as pages every browser can show.

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