When Macromedia introduced Flash onto the World Wide Web, Flash-based sites have always garnered attention and it only gets more and more popular as more and more great features are added to it. It is rather easy to foresee that Flash site population will continue to rise around the Internet. Nevertheless, there had been discussion on Flash based sites being unnecessary. Where exactly do we draw the line? Here’s a simple breakdown.

Pros:

Interactivity

Flash’s Actionscript opens up a vast field of possibilities. Programmers and designers have used Flash to create interactve features ranging from very lively feedback forms to attractive Flash-based games. This whole new level of interactivity will always leave visitors coming back for more.

A standardized site

With Flash, you do not have to worry about cross-browser compatibility. No more woes over how a certain CSS code displays differently in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. When you position your site elements in Flash, they will always appear as they are as long as the user has Flash Player installed.

Better expression through animation

In Flash, one can make use of its animating features to convey a message in a much more efficient and attractive way. Flash is a lightweight option for animation because it is vector based (hence having smaller file sizes) as opposed to real “movie files” that are raster based and hence much larger in size.

Cons:

The Flash player

People have to download the Flash player in advance before they can view Flash movies, so by using Flash your visitor range will decrease considerably because not everyone will be willing to download the Flash player just to view your site. You’ll also have to put in additional work in redirecting the user to the Flash download page if he or she doesn’t have the player installed. In short, this could be a reason for non-flash users to leave your site and never come back.

Site optimization

If your content was presented in Flash, most search engines wouldn’t be able to index your content. Thus, you will not be able to rank well in search engines and there will be less traffic heading to your site.

Loading time

Users have to wait longer than usual to load Flash content compared to regular text and images, and some visitors might just lose their patience and click the Back button. Worse, they could try to Google another site similar to what you have and go there instead. The longer your Flash takes to load, the more you risk losing visitors.

It is then recommended that you use Flash only when you absolutely need the interactivity and motion that comes with it. Otherwise, a mixture of Flash and HTML or pure text would be perfect if you intend to present simple textual and graphical information.

It may be hard to believe, but it’s a fact that there are still a number of users running on good old dialup, even though more and more subscribers are using and switching to broadband every year. It would therefore be wise to count these people in the equation when designing your website with the very major consideration for the loading time of your website. Dialup users or not, visitors appreciate it when a site loads quickly which gives them time to navigate the pages at the minimum loading time possible.

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly images on your website, which are larger in size. It is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.

You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.

If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the “quality” of the JPEG image — normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image’s file size.

PNG or Portable Network Graphic format, on the other hand, can get you the best quality at the least file size. Then there’s the option to save your images in GIF format — the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. The downside in saving in GIF format is that it will, more often than not, compromise the appearance of your image, so be sure to make your choice wisely!