Advantages and disadvantages of flash usage in web design

Flash allows web developers to create interactive content, such as animations, animated menus, movies, games and more. Flash animations can be made rapidly, using a certain type of software which provides the developer with visual tools easy to use and understand.

Flash is based on vector graphics, which means
that flash animations can be rescaled without losing the image quality. Flash animations can be embedded in HTML pages as menus, movies or web site layouts. You will be able to create presentations, short courses, quizzes, Flash being an effective multimedia tool in business marketing and e-learning due to the possibility of easy control and model of the degree of interactivity for a certain animation. Flash movies have a high loading speed, being rendered with controllable quality by all major modern web browsers.

There are also disadvantages of Flash, depending on its implementation in a web site structure. For example, if your website needs the presence of many customers, it’s recommended to avoid the excessive flash usage, especially in web sites intros. Flash is not optimized for search engine indexing, and as a consequence, the content of your Flash animation is not visible for search engine spiders.

If your flash intro will contain unoptimized raster images, the final animation size will determine higher page loading times, which could mean losing many of your visitors or customers. On the other hand, updating the Flash content of a given website could be more expensive than traditional content non-Flash based.

The selection criteria of Flash editing tools is also important, due to performance of optimization options and their cost. In conclusion, as a function of your website destination, you should carefully select the parts where Flash animations will fit in, and never overuse Flash animations.