At the WWD CEO Conference this week in New York, Google VP Marissa Mayer took the stage to give senior fashion and retail professionals some advice about their web presence. After explaining how Google Trends can help spot the waning popularity of a topic like plaid, she made her feelings clear on the use of Adobe’s Flash in fashion – a topic that PSFK has covered before. With a red line through its logo on the screen behind her, she told the audience to stop using Flash to build their site. “Its OK to use it in a window but don’t by build your whole site in it. Googles algorithms don’t like it,” she explained.

The Google executive also urged the need for speedy loading and she revealed some insights from recent user research. She said that while its difficult for the human eye to quickly scan hundreds of textual search results, a recent study she conducted showed that people can scan down through a thousand images on a page very effectively. Mayer urged that Fashion sites make hundreds of thumbnails of clothes cascade rather than get users to click through a small batch page by page.