Flash or No Flash for your Site - Pro's and Con's

Flash has been around for over a decade and has been used to create everything from animated websites, to applications, to audio and video streaming platforms (like YouTube). In the last 5 years, there has been a web design movement away from using Flash, especially when used to create an entire site. Apple's stance on Flash and not including compatibility with its mobile hardware (iPhone, iPod, and iPad) has furthered this movement. In its place, CSS3 and HTML5 are being used. There are still cases where Flash is great for web design, but they are limited and come with certain drawbacks.

Who is still using Flash?

The majority of all-Flash websites are for the creative industry: fashion, photography, arts, and restaurants. They tend to use it to supplement the work on the website:

• Fashion - a model whose clothes you can manipulate
• Photography - a faux book that you can flip through
• Arts - a gallery that you can walk through
• Restaurants - an interactive menu

Because these industries are graphic, Flash is a good choice to impress visitors and to fluff the site since they usually lack content. They don't tend to have blogs and if they do, they are not built using Flash. 

Why you shouldn't use Flash

Flash is difficult to work with, both for designers and for clients. Building a Flash website is much like creating and editing a movie (in fact, Flash has a video-editing like timeline) where the designer works with individual frames and the component of time. 

Clients can't easily update the site on their own. There are methods where the text on the Flash website comes from a text document so updating the text document updates the site, but they are not very flexible. Clients can't add another section or page to the website without a knowledge of Flash and the software. 

Flash is also very taxing on computers. Everyone is familiar with their computer's fan firing up whenever they view a Flash website or video. Flash sites also tend to be bigger and take longer to load. The internet deals in milliseconds so any additional wait can be a business killer. Finally, Flash isn't supported by a huge portion of web surfing technology.

Why you should use Flash

Flash works best when the product is better sold using interaction. You may have noticed that the majority of car manufactors include interactive cars that you can spin, re-colour, and explore. You can not do this as well or as engaging without Flash. Real estate websites often include virtual tours that cannot be done easily without Flash. The internet market dictates well when Flash should be used. Look up your competitors and the industry and see if they're using Flash. For example, if you're selling T-Shirts look up other T-Shirt commerce websites. They tend to only use images because they're sufficient and allow for quick browsing. Flash wouldn't improve this, it would make it worse.