Flash is a cool thing to have on the site and it will make people go “wow” for perhaps the first time you see it, after that it can get a bit annoying. 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 a 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
One of the big mistakes that people make when thinking about having their site designed is that they think flash animation is going to attract people to the site. 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.
Of ocurse one of the other problems is time, it takes a long time 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?
There is nothing wrong with having a small bit of flash on your site; in fact I would really recommend having a small amount on the site because it does look pretty cool.
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