To Flash or Not To Flash?

The very first factor to consider is budget.

Most people will agree with me that flash animations help to make a website look impressive. However, a full flash webiste is more tedious to set up, and therefore they cost more. First and foremost, the most important factor here is budget. Regardless of all the advantages that a flash site may bring, if you are thinking of getting something up on a modest budget, get a static site up first, the flash site can always come later.

There are 2 groups of designers out there: flash supporters and non-flash supporters.

Flash supports will tell you this:

The advantages of a flash site include:

• projects a trendy image
• impressive display of products
• interactive interface
• great for slide shows or product demos

Non-flash supporters will tell you that:

Disadvantages of flash site:

• longer development time
• costs more
• difficult to edit details
• flash intro serves no real purpose
• search engines (like Yahoo! & Google) cannot "crawl" information built into flash files (so they can't index your pages)
• takes longer time to load

Longer development time

If you are putting up a flash webiste, be sure that your designer put up a temporary page with contact information on it so that vistors can still contact you during the development stage of the website, as it can take a while.

Costs more

There is nothing we can do about flash sites costing more than thier static cousins. However, not everygthing in this world is black or white, there're also the grey areas. At äxuberant, we kind of take the middle road. The best piece of advice that we can give you is: have both, if the budget permits, if not get a static site first, the flash can come later.

Difficult to edit details

One huge difference between Flash sites and static sites is that the development files (.fla files) are not stored at the web server. They are stored in the computers of your web designers. Only the published files (.swf files) are uploaded to the web host. Meaning, if you intend to switch web designers in the future, even if the first designer is willing to release the development files, the new designer may not be too keen to spend time to study the work so as that he can built the site from there. Very likely you will have to do up another site from scratch.

Flash intro serves no real purpose

You should have realised by now that we do not agree to this point, or else you will not see our main site in flash. It is a sad but true fact that people tend to judge a book by it's cover. A flash site, to many people, is as good as a man in a branded suit - it may not make a sale right away, but it will definitely give you the first minute of attention.. And in some businesses that does help a little in creating a good impression, and a good impressions usually help people remember better.

Again, as we have mentioned before, flash is ideal for photo galleries, product demos or catalogs.

Can search engines index a flash site?

It is true that search engines cannot crawl flash pages and thus the information will not be indexed. However, you can always have some information in html that the search engines can index. We did a test and uploaded a fully flash website with no information in html and we still managed to get the page and title indexed by Google! So it's not true that search engines won't index a flash site, as long as you know how to do it.

Takes longer time to load

It is true that flash animations usually take a longer time to load as compared to a static page. Thus is always recommended to give your visitors an alternative, if they have not time to wait for the page to load, they can always visit your static page.

By the way, have you seen long queues at restaurants or food stalls when there are other stalls around with no queue? It is interesting that sometimes these stall owners are cooking at a leisurely pace! It makes us wonder whether they are deliberately doing it to create a scene as a form of advertisement. Our point is that people do wait for good stuff, and for those who will not, there should be always an alternative.

Conclusion

Flash web sites are impressive and they are excellent for product demos and galleries, or to simply impress the visitor with sight, sound and interactivity. So impress your visitors with a flash site but allow those that do not bother or do not have time to wait for the animation to load an alternative static site to navigate. In that way, you will appeal to the different personalities out there.