We've all been there. Â You go to a website looking for useful information only to get bombarded by error messages informing you that an additional plugin is needed to view the content. Â Downloading plugins to view webpages is annoying, frustrating, and thanks to a trend towards low power mobile devices, it's quickly becomingÂ
impossible (read on). Â Who is the biggest culprit in this war against standards you might ask? Why Flash of course!
The internet is built upon a set of standards that all browsers must be able to cope with. Â These standards include buzz words like HTML, Javascript, and CSS. Â These words allow website developers to make pages look the way they do, and act the way they we expect them to act. Â But some developers and church website hosting providers like
Clover (http://www.cloversites.com/) take an entirely different approach and go with non standard technologies like Flash and Silverlight to draw their pages. Â These tools can be easier for the hosting providers, but they simply don't work without an endless array of plugins each and every person who views your website will need to install. Â Church website companies like
SteepleConnect are 100% standards compliant and do not require a single plugin for the ENTIRE website, including both the parts your visitors see, as well as the administrative back end. Â This is quite a bit harder to accomplish, but is well worth the efforts. Â
... but thats not all. Â Sure installing a plugin is annoying, but pretty much everybody has Flash installed by now, right? Â If this were five years ago, that might be true, but the trend towards mobile devices in recent years has all but put an end to that assertion. Â Adobe themselves (the creators of Flash) have recently announced that they will be
completely dropping support for Flash on all mobile devices, and iDevices like iPhones/iPads never had Flash support from the beginning. Â What is Adobe supporting instead? You guessed it, standards like HTML, Javascript, and CSS. Â So why would your church buy a website which is built entirely on a technology that is being scrapped by the company who wrote it?
... and then it gets worse for plugins. Â Microsoft recently announced that in their upcoming browser (Internet Explorer 10), they will actually be
blocking the use of all plugins, not just on mobile devices, but on the Desktop too! Â This includes Flash as well as Silverlight, Microsoft's own web browser plugin. Â They too have announced their full support for standards instead. Â
What does this mean for you? Â Avoid church website companies who use Flash or Silverlight or any other plugin based frameworks like the
Plague.  It's only a matter of time before these plugins go the way of the dodo bird and the Polaroid Camera.  Instead, look for church website providers like
SteepleConnect who are 100% standards compliant and are future proof for years to come!
