Macromedia Flash (officially discontinued at the end of 2020) is a wonderful tool for adding games, animation, and video to your website. If you know how to use Flash effectively, you can increase your page views and customers. Flash is a powerful tool, but like every tool in the Web developer’s toolbox, it should only be used with due consideration of all factors in a given situation.
Get your website design noticed — Flash can really make your website flashy… Not necessarily effective!
Flash is a powerful tool for delivering animation, games, shopping carts, vector graphics, and sound effects.
- Flash is browser independent, and has no issues with cross browser compatibility.
- It is easy to create animations in Flash, and then easy to view them.
- Flash technology makes it possible to make your website more interactive and expressive.
- Flash supports audio, animation, and advanced video handling and interactivity.
- Flash applications can be used to collect data, online games, feedback forms, photo slide show, audio, movies, charts, shopping carts, and many other different web applications.
How Flash May REDUCE your Website’s Effectiveness.
The primary problem with flash is that it is not very search-engine friendly. So if you want to get any organic search engine traffic, you have to be very careful with how you use flash. There are some other limitations to be aware of:
- Flash requires installing the Flash player plug-in, which the user is required to download, or to upgrade the Flash player.
- Information embedded in Flash is often invisible to search engines.
- Many Flash applications and websites can be very large and slow to download.
- Some web users have learned to disable Flash in web pages to avoid animated advertising and to improve page load times.
- Most mobile devices, don’t display Flash websites. With a growing number of people using their mobile devices for Internet browsing, the use of Flash on your website will reduce its accessibility.
So what’s the takeaway here: Flash should be used for integrating applications, tools, video, audio and other enriching user experiences. However, Flash should not replace HTML for the use of content, menus and links.
Get more powerful ideas for web design in the United Kingdom by consulting Vudu, the leading website design company in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Call us on (028) 90 480 257 or send an email to info@vududigital.co.uk to discuss the pros and cons of using Flash.