Flash-based sites have been gaining in popularity for a few years now, and with Macromedia continuing to beef up Flash with some real impressive features, more such sites can be expected in the future. More often than not however, Flash-based sites are bloated and a waste of time. This list includes some of the main pros and cons.
The Good: Interactivity
At core, Flash’s Actionscript offers countless possibilities. Ranging from interactive feedback forms to full-on games solely based on Flash, designers and programmers have pushed Flash to create very interactive features that can set your site above others, bringing visitors back for more.
Standardized Display
With Flash, all the headaches of cross-browser compatibility issues are gone. You do not need to consider how a certain CSS code is going to look differently in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Opera. Items positioned in Flash will appear alike provided that the user has the Flash Player installed.
Higher Potential for Expression through Animation
Flash enabled message delivery through effective and efficient animation. Since the flash is vector-based, the file size of the animations is smaller than raster based movie files, hence it is light weight for animation.
The Bad and the Ugly: Flash Player Requirement
Many visitors still need to download the Flash Player in order to view Flash content, and this greatly cuts down on your potential audience since few people are willing to go to the trouble of downloading the player just so that they can view your site. You are also going to have to redirect users to the Flash download page if they don’t already have the player.
Issues That Tend to Bring Out the Worst in Site Optimization
Search engines index difficulty in content that is delivered in Flash, and this may torpedo your Search engine rankings and reduce traffic to your site.
Loading Time Issues
Comparatively, flash content is slow to load with just plain text and images, and it tries the patience of visitors. The more time your Flash content takes to download, the greater is the possibility that the visitors will pound out of there, hitting the back button.
Using Flash to the Best Advantage
The best approach is to reserve Flash only for those times when you really need the interactivity and animation, mixing Flash with HTML or purely text-based content. This is more appropriate to simple textual and graphical information.
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