While contemplating how to pitch a long-standing client for new web services, I came to the realization that we need to convince them to kill off their current website. It’s a beautiful site, filled with many subtle touches. But it’s a Flash site, and as such, it has many limitations. You can add content, but not without changing the design and nowhere near as easily as if we just designed a new CMS-enabled site for them.

Because the Flash site wasn’t created to hold an ever-deepening well of content, it takes about 15 minutes at the most to exhaust anyone’s curiosity and you’re left with this toy that just sits there like an animatronic toy with limited behavior set. This site does not serve their brand nearly as well as they may think it does.

And since it’s a Flash site, we won’t be able to plug in our behavioral analytics tools to show them how users are interacting with the site. We will have a difficult time building a case based on hard numbers. Instead, we’ll approach the problem from another angle, the website as social media hub.

As a brand, it’s important that they reach their customers but they don’t get to pick the channel any longer. The day of the website as your channel to your customers is dead. Brands need a social media hub that allows them to update content for customer reach in one place, and broadcast that message to the customers where and how they want to be reached.

To explain what I mean, let me offer an example. You can reach my wife through email or Facebook, and maybe her Yahoo News page. My sister is only going to see text-based email. You can find me through several channels, but I’d prefer to have anything a brand has to say come through an RSS feed so that I can decide when I have time for it. I don’t want more email cluttering my inbox, and I probably won’t visit your website on my daily rounds. If a brand want to interact with me, they better give me choices.

It’s possible to build a social media hub in Flash but when I crunch the numbers on the development hours involved, it simply doesn’t make sense. Every new thing we come up with will both cost more and take us further from the simple and elegant design of a well-executed Flash site and more toward the web 2.o open source toolkit. It makes sense to just scrap the Flash site and start building fresh with the toolkit.

Now if only I can convince the client… I welcome your suggestions on how I can be the most convincing.