To Flash or Not To Flash?

Posted by Matt - November 10, 2006 on 7:44 pm | In Web Design, Web Graphics |

Today I had a conversation with someone who needed someone to design  Flash Websites and other Flash projects.  It made me think about some of the positives and negatives of using Flash animations and Flash websites.

I used to do much more with Flash animations than I do now. Some website visitors find the movement, sound, and "dynamic" look of flash animations interesting. There are also others though that are turned off by Flash (some because of those annoying flashing banner ads made with Flash…. gees those things are annoying!).

In general though I think using a small flash banner or animation on a website is ok. I generally like to save the file in an older Flash format so that more website visitors will be able to view the animation without having to have the latest Flash Player version (Most website visitors will NOT download a plugin unless its pretty darn important.).

This brings me to websites made entirely in flash: DON’T DO IT! There are several drawbacks with designing a site entirely in flash.

  1. Website visitors will not be able to view anything on your site if they don’t have Flash installed (Or if their computer is old like mine at my other work… its so slow its unusable!).
  2. If you want your website to do well in Internet searches (like Google), don’t use a lot of Flash. Google and other Internet search engines are not able to read the text and other components inside the flash file. If the entire site’s done in Flash… there is nothing to the search engines to index… and as a result nothing to show up in an Internet search.
  3. Hard to maintain: when the site needs updating you are looking at  a slower and more expensive process than a site based upon HTML.

My Recommendations:

I don’t see anything wrong with using a limited amount of Flash on a website. The bulk of the site should be HTML (regular web pages). That way it can be indexed by search engines and also will have content that is viewable by website visitors that don’t have  the proper Flash Player installed. The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) results will also be much better.

The Flash should also not be too annoying (no flash banners that alternate between black and white colors…uggg).

If the Flash animations is not vital to the site and is a simple animation, I sometimes prefer to use an animated gif (an animated picture file). The end user does not have to have a special player installed (everyone can view it). The only drawback to an animated .gif file though is that it can be larger than a flash file, especially if not compresses properly.

So…. be sure to Flash responsibly!  

If you have a question or comment about using Flash on your website I’d love to hear your comment or answer any questions….

 


No Comments yet »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>