Flash^®

People that know me well know that I don’t like Flash very much. Shocking? A little. I consider myself a very competent Flash designer and programmer- I’ve been doing very advanced work in it for years. Flash is very cool and things designed in Flash can look really good.

That said, I would recommend to most people that they not make a “flash site.” I think that specific parts of a site can be greatly benefitted by Flash. The problem comes with making your entire site in Flash. Even for that I would say there are a couple exceptions. Here are what I consider to be the strengths and weaknesses of Flash:

Strengths

• It is everywhere. Flash is on more computers than Windows. I believe the current statistic is that it’s on 98% of computers, with 5 million downloads every day of the latest plugin.
• When you design it in Flash, it looks the same on all those different computers. NOTE: last time I checked it still had the same problem as regular web pages when it comes to fonts.
• Flash uses “vector” art which scales bigger or smaller and still looks smooth.
• The latest versions of Flash can leverage Web Services. This is mostly good for big businesses. If you are a big business, look into Flex.

Weaknesses

• Very hard to work with- Flash is, to me, potentially much more time consuming to build in than any other web-related technology.
• Search engines and bookmarking tend not to work in Flash web sites.
• Browsers can’t interact with Flash, so if someone is in your Flash website and they press “Back” in their browser, they leave your site.
• In Flash, users have to learn a new way of interacting with the web page on nearly every Flash site out there, whereas they have grown accustomed to non-Flash web pages.