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Flash

Many web sites use Flash (now called Adobe Flash but formerly Macromedia Flash). Flash has many components but it is fundamentally a file format that can contain many different graphic formats including animations and movies.

Using Flash on a web site is very tempting because a page can be very interactive with very pretty controls which react and respond as the visitor’s mouse passes over it. There are places where Flash is appropriate or may be the only workable solution. For instance sites like Google Video or YouTube both use Flash format for the movies they show. The photo sharing site Flickr.com uses Flash interfaces to help visitors manage their collections of photos. Many other sites do very clever and fancy things with Flash.

However, there are many disadvantages to using Flash on normal web sites. Here are some of them

Compatability / Accessability

Flash is available (and even pre installed) on most of the major browsers, but there are browsers that cannot display Flash files. If the content of your site is only shown in Flash then many visitors will not be able to see your content. This is especially true of specialist browsers for the partially sighted and blind. There can also be compatability issues even when users can play Flash files but only older formats when the designer has used the latest version of Flash to access one of the latest features.

Searchability

Flash files are not indexed by search engines. If you are not interested in search engines finding your site then it is not a problem. But if you do want to be found on Google, then don’t put your content in Flash files.

Bandwidth

Flash files can be very efficient but when things get fancy they can be big and can take minutes to load even over a broadband connection. Many people especially those with slower connections may give up before your page has loaded.

Navigation Techniques

Some sites use a single Flash file which contains all of the pages with the site. But when this is done all of the normal web browser functions that users can use to navigate a site (like the back button and bookmarking) cannot be used.

Maintenance Overhead

Flash authoring is a completely different technology to normal web pages requiring a fairly expensive proprietary editor. Many of the normal tools for maintaining sites especially larger sites do not apply or cannot be used with Flash. This can make them more cumbersome to maintain and adapt over time.

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