Flash is a great little thing that you can have on your site that will in fact make users go “wow that’s pretty cool” perhaps if your lucky, and this will be for the first time users only. Once the first look it will start to get very old very quickly to people and they will start to get a bit annoyed by how long the site is taking to load.
99.9% of the time flash will give you very poor usability disease. There are some good designs of flash and it has to be said that when it is done right it looks simply fantastic but most of the time they are just awful websites.
So why does flash degrade websites?
Encourages Design Abuse
Breaks Fundamental Interaction Principles
Directs Attention For The Site’s Value
A huge mistske that people tend to make when they are thinking of having their site designed is that they seem to think flash is going to do their site some huge favours. Of course it will if it is a decent looking bit of flash but the chances are you are not going to have the budget to have a great lookign flash site built.
Time can be another big problem, it can take a very long time indeed to design a site like this. It will take a very long time to get the animation together and this is simply for the home page, imagine if you wanted the entire site to be flash?
A small bit of flash on the site can be very useful indeed and look brilliant but I would never say to go too far with it as it just takes too long to load.
If you are struggling to realise just how you want your site designed then I suggest getting a decent web design team involved.
Of course if you have a site and it isn’t doing well you could bring in the SEO team.
Tags: Flash Animation, SEO, web design