Flash - aha - Saviour of the Internet?

10th October 2008

Flash has its place; it's great for adverts, playing movies and anything that really, really needs smooth animation, but whole websites? I think not.

I've always had an issue with Flash being used in such a fashion. Yes, google can now index some of it, but only if it's been coded properly and in a search engine friendly way. During a recent project (for the Impreza S microsite) we had several discussions about how best to present the creative we had for this site.

In the end flash won, but with lots of consideration towards how google et al. Firstly, not all of the site is in Flash (yey!) the navigation is HTML and interacts with the flash. A few other things like sitemaps help the site to be friendly.

The reason for our decission to go with Flash is mainly due to the colour changer. Regardless of how good the ajax libraries are (jQuery in particular) they currently dont handle image switching quite so smoothly. The final reason was the page transistion; I still find it somewhat unusal and a bit disorenting, but a good effect.

On the whole I feel the site is nicely done (good job Sheldon!) and considering the timeline for it, it is a sterling example of how flash sites should be handled.

On the other hand, some flash sites worry me. Certain so called 'creative' agencies who decide that just because they're creative they need their site to be 'creative' - which to them means Flash. In most of these cases you will find that the reason for the entire site being flash is something stupid like 'we want our logo to be animated and interesting'

There are many such sites out there, you just have to look for them. When you find them ask this question: 'Is that silly little logo / animated character / smooth page transition / custom font worth the issues with accessiblity, maintance, readability etc'