I love flash! Flash is, well…flashy! Why buy a Kia when you could drive around in a red Ferrari? Flash is like that. You can take a plain ordinary web page and turn it into something sexy and exciting. But, just like there are pro and cons to driving a Ferrari, there are also good points and bad points to be considered when you design in Flash. Let me try to cover some major issues.

Advantages

Do you want the good news or the bad news first? Let’s start with looking at some of the reasons flash is so great. First of all, consider animation. If this paper were written in flash the words could jump up and fly right off the page! This would hold your attention better and keep you entertained. That’s why so many musicians and artists want a flash web site. They are trying to appeal to a young vibrant audience. Their target audience is the X-Box generation who demand graphics and action. Today’s young adults have a short attention span and they are easily bored. You have to reach out and grab them! Keep them entertained or they will move on. They are looking for something spectacular. Flash is how you put that “wow” factor into a site. Flash has amazing abilities that make it easy to build the interactive games that are popular with this crowd. It is also a great tool to use if you wanted to design an educational website for children. Flash would enable you to include some fun interactive learning games for them.

Another advantage in Flash is that many customers want streaming audio and video. Thanks to the great tools in Flash, it is easy to incorporate this into a website. Flash has a superior compression rate as compared to PhotoShop, Fireworks and other similar programs. Because of the extraordinary compression abilities found in Flash, sites like YouTube and MySpace are using Flash format on their sites. Some of these same customers are concerned about displaying photography or artwork on a site. In XHTML work may easily be stolen. Right click, and so often it’s gone! In Flash, it is very hard to steal an image. You would have to download the swf file, decompile it, and then you’re left with a low quality bit map image. Thus, using Flash automatically builds in some protection against pirating an image.

Disadvantages

Now, the bad news! Loading time can be a real pain. People hate to wait. If your site is Flash heavy it takes time to load. Animation, streaming audio and video, and other special effects really slow down a site. This may cause many users (especially those on a dial-up connection) to grow impatient and leave. This problem can be lessened if the web designer makes sure the initial file size is small. Flash has the ability to display content to the user faster than a standard website would display. But most designers who use Flash don’t take the time to ensure the speed and bandwidth is low on initial loading.

Not long ago, search engines couldn’t read flash at all. Within the past couple of years Google pioneered new technology so that their database could read Flash. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t read it very well. This means, it is hard for a flash site to get high rankings on Google. For this reason, some designers build two website versions for their clients. They design one in Flash and one in XHTML/CSS, so that search engines can read the latter version and get better results. Most designers don’t do this because it takes a lot of time to design and update. It is double the work, and many customers wouldn’t want to pay for two sites.

Another consideration is that Flash does not recognize the back button. Don’t you just hate it when you are browsing along and you want to go back to the previous page, and the back button ignores you? This is because Flash is one big file and is not separated into sections or pages as XHTML sites are. Flash has no previous page. This effect can be countered by using anchors to section off the site. But, this is cumbersome and only works in the IE browser. Also, the anchor uses JavaScript to function and many times the user has JS disabled. The same problem exists when you try to bookmark what appears to be a page on a Flash site. The bookmark will always refer back to the first frame first layer of the flash file.

Accessibility is a major issue in Flash. If you are visually impaired Flash sites are pretty much inaccessible. There may be lots of fun graphics going on, but what you are really looking for is the content. Suppose you want to roll up the text and make it bigger. This is usually easy enough to do- but not in Flash. There is no way to magnify the text in Flash. You can’t be W3C compliant like that! Abobe is working on making Flash more accessible, but it is taking a long time.

My major complaint about Flash is that so many advertisers misuse it. I hate those big flashy banners that you can’t get to go away! And if I see that red flashing WINNER WINNER WINNER ad one more time I’m gonna toss my monitor out the window! Unfortunately, the only way to counter this is to use an ad blocker. This will filter out many of these annoyances, but will also block entire flash sites! So far, there is no good solution for this irritating practice.

So…

There are many problems with Flash. But you have to admit, Flash is just plain cool! It is a powerful web tool that gives the designer the ability to create sites that are truly “extreme.” Flash is like fireworks on the fourth of July! Flash puts you in the seat of that Ferrari and lets you take it for a spin.