Is this best or worth?

[xtremee]

Hi all,

Is that good to design my website using flash with html link between each 4 pages?

i know that flash give me alot of options, but i think that it will be take long time to open my site due to loading effect.

i'm thinking about using ASP.net insteal of flash and use flash only in Ads.

So,

What is your opinion?

[tain]

My opinion is that Flash should be a web designer's last resort to meet customer requirements when nothing else will suffice.

[xtremee]

1st thanks for reply

But wanna to know what is the disadvantages of Flash as website?

FYI, i don't like to make site with flash

[Chozo4]

I would believe the pro/con of flash as follows:

PRO:

1) Fully graphical and fluid animation

2) More options and 'eye candy' abilities

CON:

1) Increased size leaves users waiting

2) A slow pc will see your site slow+choppy and not fluid

3) Harder to manage later on should you make changes as you would have to change each flash 'page'

4) Bandwidth consumption increases due to each user having to download the whole 'site' (flash) to do stuff rather than follow only to the areas they want.

5) Older browsers or browsers with a great amount of security features set will cause your site to be unusable

5a) Proxies/Firewalls configured to deny flash objects will also deny usability of your site

6) Flash is not accessable to many impared (of any degree) users

.. I'm sure there are more con's but thats what I can think of off the top of my head. HTML is more than good to use as it's backward compatible, usable in many other browsers, to programs designed to make it usable to impared users. If you need any other fancy effects you can cover that using javascript or VBScript.

Any html site can look like a flash site with the right scripting in the right places and still be more usable than a pure flash site. Tinker with the idea and you might be suprised.

The power of your site rests solely in your hands. However, it's best to tailor to many users rather than some. Though if it is just as a personal site that isn't going to be expected to be viewed by many, then perhaps flash is a viable options purely for the satisfaction.

[CoffeeFiend]

My opinion is that Flash should be a web designer's last resort to meet customer requirements when nothing else will suffice.

Agreed. I see so many websites that use flash pointlessly (for things like a plain navigation menu instead of just hyperlinks).

And since flash is used mainly for those annoying ads (like "hit the monkey" and such) - with the exception of some video sharing sites - lots of people end up blocking flash altogether (I do). And it's annoying having to download some plugin to view a web page when it isn't installed (it's commonly installed, but not always - not like it ships with the browser). Oh, it's also seemingly used by those annoying and totally pointless site "intros" that just make you wait forever to load before giving you a "skip" button too (I hate that). Waiting for pages (or flash) to load forever plain sucks.

And as Chozo4 said, there's accessibility problems. Not only that screen readers won't work. Also that people can't change font sizes or colors/constrast in flash stuff (neither do my userContent.css rules work). Neither can people bookmark stuff easily, nor can they easily copy/paste stuff... Even for regular users it's a pain.

And flash is usually pretty bad for search engine placement too. Nothing indexes better than [x]html - certainly not flash. Good luck getting search engines to spider/index contents inside your swf files! Unless you start doing fancy things like dynamically replacing (DOM manipulation via JS) your site text for flash contents using javascript - not that javascript support is universal either. Some search engines won't spider/index flash at all.

I'd use flash if it was the only thing that could do the job (and that's hardly ever the case - except if you're into those flashy "hit the monkey" things).

[ripken204]

i personally HATE flash sites. i dont want to wait for sites to load and when the site finally loads, there are usually a bunch of dumb animations before you can even click on something. all i want to do is get info, not watch a movie. and making a site in flash will take much longer than it will to code it in html.

[tain]

Another thing that worries me about Flash: ubiquity.

What other software is as ubiquitous as Flash? I can't think of anything. It is cross-platform, global and has loyal users who upgrade quickly.

Think about the security and privacy implications of that.