Web Design - Pros and Cons of Using Flash Design
By Matt Morriscey
When considering flash for use in anything, you must first ask yourself, “Do I really need to?”

In many cases Flash is the best use, in many others, it proves to be unneeded and a poor use of resources. Have you ever gone to a company website to be bombarded by annoying animations, slow loading times, and poor usability? Did you buy something from that company, or did you go to a competitor because their site was fast loading, easy to use and navigate? It has many useful applications, and many needless ones.

Cons
In the areas Flash excels, it makes little sense to use anything else. Now that 96% of internet enabled PCs have a version of Flash installed, it is the most common plug-in for web browsers, surpassing even Java, which is pre-installed on windows machines. When Flash starts being used for things other technologies do better, is when we get a problem. One big problem with flash is that search engines can’t read them properly. The makers of Flash, Adobe Inc. and google have teamed up to produce a new search algorithm that can now read text from within flash files.

This is great news for people who want to use flash on their site but again, it may not be the best course of action.

Adding to the list of cons in Flash Is the usability limitations. Newer versions of flash make it possible to backtrack within flash sites by using the back button. This wasn’t always so, and in fact, is rarely the case today. On many sites entirely made out of flash clicking back won’t take you to the last page visited, but exit the flash website, and return you to the splash page or worse, the site before. This is frustrating to both the user, and the business. If the customer can’t easily navigate the site, then the business just lost a potential customer. That’s just no fun for anybody.

Skip Intro>>. Does that look familiar to anyone? It’s common nowadays to have animated intros to a website. Often times they are quite well done, pleasing to look at, and informative. Unfortunately more often than not simply annoy the user with a needless bit of fluff for 4 minutes, and drive up development costs. The nice websites will put a “skip intro” button on the site, the ones that don’t will be cursed to no end by impatient and Dial-up users. If you have to put a button on that says “skip intro”, then think about it for a few minutes. It may be best for you to do the same and just skip the intro, if it serves no real purpose.

To round out the usability issues in Flash, are a few things that most users wouldn’t even think about, unless you belong to a group of users that actually NEEDS this functionality. The size of the text isn’t adjustable for the user like it is using HTML and CSS, and this can cause problems for users with poor eyesight, or the text may just have been too small to begin with for most users, and they have no way to easily read what’s on the page. Then we come to the users who just plain can’t see the text, and rely on “screen readers” to dictate to them the text displayed on screen. The problem with this is that most screen readers don’t have the ability to read flash files, so anyone who relies on these programs will be unable to obtain information from your site.

Then there are smaller problems that aren’t apparent to most, such as default link colors. The flash file won’t take on your settings for visited links; rather it will just have the settings it was coded with. Features such as right click are normally disabled, and Flash is a resource hog. If something is too complex and the user is on a slower PC they may notice slow-down issues on your site, which may leave a bad taste in the users mouth, and cause them to leave almost immediately.

PROS
At this point you’re probably thinking why you would even want to use flash, since it comes with all these inherent problems. Well? What is it that makes you feel you “need” to use flash?

Well, Flash is one of the most powerful web applications available, and if you can imagine it, there is a good chance it can be created in flash. The previously mentioned intros, while not always necessary, can provide an experience that simply cannot created with other technologies on the web. They are an effective tool for self promotion if used properly. Generally an intro should be no longer than 30 seconds and should have some relevance to the website, not just used for a “wow” effect. Granted the “wow” effect isn’t without merit, everybody wants to show off a little, but once the effect has worn off what’s left? Your users/customers will need a reason to come back and eye-candy alone won’t do it.

Perhaps one of the best uses of Flash has nothing to do with the internet. It is increasingly common that Flash will be used for a fully interactive multimedia presentation, instead of a fairly ho-hum slide show. The ability to incorporate video, audio, animations, and interactivity to your presentations, is your way of engrossing the user. An example of a good use for a flash presentation can be found here. Take their attention hostage, and don’t release it until you’ve made your point.

Those are both great uses of flash but neither really helps with the actual website. Flash uses vector graphics, which are basically a series of mathematical points. Depending on what is required, flash can offer nice graphics with very low file sizes as opposed to traditional .png, jpg, and Gif images. Banner images come to mind, You Can have something in flash be 2KB in size, whereas in JPG it will be 22K.
Not only that but the Flash banner can have some subtle animation on it as well. With millions of people viewing your site, you can quickly see that the flash file would not only be faster for your users to download (especially those on dialup), but far less of a burden on your website host, making it cheaper for you, and more reliable. Providing that the developer is experienced and using vector graphics.

Many smaller websites with only a few pages are being created entirely in flash. It is an easy way to provide a product tour, a multimedia presentation, or simply to dress up an otherwise minimalist site. It can be used for content within a standard HTML/PHP page where dynamic content is needed, or it is simply easier than using more complex methods such as Java, or AJAX. Flash is quickly becoming the standard for video. Recent versions of flash have made it very easy to import video, and there is no worry if the user has a compatible media player installed such a Real Player, QuickTime, or Windows Media Player. Currently one of the largest video websites on the net www.youtube.com uses flash to handle all of the video.

Flash is great for non-traditional web applications, that can feature varying degrees of interactivity. Many Portfolio sites, Movies and Games, and product websites use flash to provide the user with a fully interactive website, which can deliver rich audio, and video, full 3d demonstrations, product tours, games, full animations, and completely unique web experiences.

For few examples take a look at poker-lessons.net, or how hydroponics systems work.

Conclusion
Flash is the most flexible tool currently available to web designers. Anything a client could want is possible with flash, but it is not always the best possible choice for a particular application. Often times flash is not the best idea for use in a website. Many things that can be done in flash can be done with other web standards, and it is our job as developers to aid the client in deciding where the flexibility and functionality of flash are best suited.