Flash Loving and Hating it
Everyone knows what flash is. It s a good presentation tool limited only by the imagination of the creator. When done right, you can lift your website to a greater level of graphical excellence. However, that is not what is happening nowadays. Everyone seems to be misusing the technology, causing all sorts of problem, especially of the usability and search indexing kind.
Most people go to the internet to find information, not to sit in front of the computer watching graphical movies made from flash. Internet users want above all, a fast connection to the internet, quality of website contents, and ease of navigation around it.
Flash presents some of these problems:
Bandwidth and Load Time Constrains: Sites designed with Flash take a long
time to download and consume vast amounts of bandwidth. Not all users have a broadband connection. Flash forces users with dial-up connections to spend valuable time watching the load bar, instead of getting to the information they want, fast.
Usability Constrains: When you navigate a Flash site designed with a older version, the back button does not work: instead of taking you to the previous screen, it will get you out of the Flash site. Also, the standard colours for visited and unvisited links will not work, and users have no control over the text size they want to use.
Furthermore, many times Flash sites go against the interactive nature of the web. Since Flash technology favours a "presentation style" approach that resembles television, users are many times reduced to mere observers that get bored after a while, no matter how good the graphics look.
Search Engine Constrains: Although large search engines like Google now have some Flash indexing capabilities, these are still very limited. You will definitely have a hard time achieving high rankings with a Flash site. One option around this problem is to design a second, search-engine-friendly HTML version of your site. This, though, usually represents an unnecessary expense in both time and money, since in most cases the HTML version alone will get the job done.
Although few, there are some instances when Flash technology can actually be
helpful:
a) When you need to show a presentation, for example a demo of your
product.
b) To develop interactive games, like those found on sites for kids like
Sesame Street, Nickelodeon, or Yahoo! Games.
c) When you want to dress up a minimalist site. In this case, a small
Flash animation or banner embedded in an HTML document will not consume
excessive bandwidth, will load fast, and will enhance the appearance of a
bare-bones site.
Because of the size that it creates, flash files are only good for specific tasks, such as demo presentations. The company making flash, Adobe (yes, Macromedia has been bought over by Adobe), is constantly improving the technology, but at the current moment there is nothing we can do but to use it wisely.
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