Macromedia introduced flash on the internet a few years ago. As more and more features are offered we can only expect that the growing number of sites embedding flash movies will continue to grow. Undeniably, flash enables our sites to become more interactive, entertaining and downright beautiful but still continues to attract hoards of comments as being unnecessary and overly done. Where exactly do we begin to draw the line as being flash-based or not? Here is a quick run down.
Interactivity is one of the best feature of a flash site. From flash games, interactive quizzes, rotating images to web forms provide a major component for the visitors to keep coming back. Programmers and designers have been pushing the limits of flash to suffice the never ending craze for being ‘part’ of the whole presentation.
Have you ever visited a site that looks good on Firefox but not on Internet explorer? Or perhaps a website that shows ‘Best Viewed on Internet Explorer’ notice before they let you in? This is basically a cross-browser problem compatibility. As a programmer or website designer, this posses a major setback and eats a lot of time during the development trying to test the outcome of every browsers on the market. However, with flash all you need to have is a flash player installed on the viewer’s machine and your ready to go.
Expressing thoughts to animation. Some things are better explained through animating objects and flash movies are way too compressed as their real movie counterpart that indeed they are getting the attention of being the top notched animators. This is because flash uses vector graphics (and therefore a lot smaller) while the other is raster based and therefore a lot larger in its size.
Flash do require a flash player and redirecting people with no flash to a download site can sometimes irritating specially for non geeky visitors. Now, if the visitor refuses to download the flash player, your site will be completely non viewable. One way to counter this problem is to provide a separate pages for flash and non flash visitors. This again will sum up additional hours in the development.
Optimizing a Flash-site is extremely difficult. This is because spiders (search engines) would not be able to read or understand the site. Spiders read content and if 90% of your site is flash-based, then expect a low organic traffic (traffic generated by search engines) heading towards your site.
Flash-based site also needs an ample loading time, specially on machines with slow internet connections. This is because a flash movie needs to be loaded all together before it actually starts as compared to text and images which are loaded almost simultaneously. Visitors patience are tested on this part and according to the studies, they do not wait as much as 15 seconds to see your presentation come alive. They head off to another site, millions of them anyway.
With the advent of broadband internet connections, embedding flash movies on your website is no longer a problem. Properly optimizing your movies to tolerable loading time is probably the best way to go. You should also consider mixing flash with regular text and images to promote search engine optimization. After all, a site without visitor is just like a bride without a groom.
James Roy Celeste works as a resident writer for http://www.content-graphics.com
Tags: flash-based website, macromedia flash, website in flash
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