Adobe has finally given up on Flash and announced it is moving to HTML5. While this is news, it is part of the overall trend perplexing advertisers, graphic designers and affecting all Internet users. Alas, I am old enough to remember when typography was actually “cut and pasted.” I recall the pain and expense of moving from manual labor to computers. First, we used PageMaker. Then came Quark. Now we love InDesign. We moved from storing files on floppy drives to SyQuest drives to Jaz drives to CDs to DVDs then to huge servers and now the cloud.
On the programming side, first we used straight HTML and Access databases. Next, we moved to ColdFusion. Then our agency tried its hand at SQL servers and ASP.NET. Later, we threw in some PHP programming with dashes of JavaScript and jQuery. Next came mobile app development with its many new challenges, languages and platforms. Now we are beginning to embrace HTML5 in place of Flash. We are adding video at enormous rates and discovering new platforms for social marketing.
All of this change transpired within the last 12 years. What does this mean? In my father’s era as the original Howard Miller, he put money into people that cut and pasted and designed layouts. I allocate the same amount of money to fewer, computer-literate graphic designers and allot additional funds to cover their hardware, software and on-going education. A second fleet of specially trained employees then works in a collaborative, creative cycle to ensure search engines discover the content we generate. After the search engines fetch the data, this team works to analyze the results. In addition, they study major search engines from Google to Bing and Yandex to Baidu to spot trends and address algorithm changes.
While it’s fun to be at the start of a revolution, it does cost more. The good news is we know our investments are working to engage our clients and their customers.
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