Pier Inc, recently launched their new site powered by a custom Flash blog/cms engine. My conclusion? It's really an example of digging a hole with a stick of dynamite instead of a shovel. Now, I'll admit, at a quick first glance I thought it looked promising, but thankfully Evan snapped me back to reality saying:

Funny how Flash is trying to imitate things that are easy to do with CSS.

This led me to go back and take a less distracted look at the site which made me see that they spent a lot of time trying to reinvent the wheel.

If you look at the Pier site, you see a basic blog format (I actually don't see any pages other than the articles). But instead of using a very efficient and specialized tool for this purpose, they attempt to bend Flash into a function outside of its strength. Find one critical element of that site that couldn't have been more effectively accomplished using XHTML, CSS, and PHP/MySQl (or any other server-side combo). Yes, there are animations, and sometimes animations can help immerse the user into the experience, but in a blog?

Furthermore some of the execution is just plain odd. Take a look at the URL structures for example.

http://pierinc.com/#article=13B7CED5-F1F6-97FC-22987CCDFC2E7E40.

How exactly is that search-engine friendly? Or human-friendly for that matter. There is nothing descriptive about the content in the URL or the page title. Even though the statement accompanying the launch of this platform makes statements about back-button functionality and SEO, I'm just not seeing it. Try going to an article, clicking the "edit & send" link in the Share Media box in the sidebar, then clicking the Back button. It takes me back to the homepage, not the article I was just reading. That's a wierd Back button. Not to mention the fact that they got rid of my scroll bar arrows and broke the 2-finger scrolling feature on my iBook (though it could be because it's accomplished through a hack).

I'll admit that I may be a little baised as I am not exactly a big Flash proponent. But this is mostly because of its consistent misapplication. In my eyes, Flash works best when utilized in "widget" form. Embedding flash into an area of an HTML web site to serve media (video especially), or to visualize data (see Google Finance) is the best use of the tool. Only in an instance where the web site is totally experience driven does a full Flash site make sense. But in a site like a blog, Flash is out of its element.

So why do we keep making the same mistakes with our choice of tools? Hopefully AJAX has a better (and quicker) path to maturation because we are already stuck with its inaccurate label as a technology rather than a technique.

Update: Looks like the whole system was developed as a means for user-tracking. I guess that makes sense, but it still doesn't address the ugly URL's, SEO issues, poor usability, broken back button, scrollbar replacement, Flash performance issues, cookie requirements, etc. that they claim to fix.