20th August 2008
Flash
Flash is a great tool to make your website more 'flashy'. Interactive banners, interactive games and also full on flash e-commerce stores can mean that a site can be brought to life as though it was a on-line play area. Flash can heighten the users experience by adding interactive movement to any item. However, Flash must be used wisely, too much flash may annoy users, having to see the same menu fly in or fade in each time they visit a page can get very annoying, constantly flashing or moving items can pull attention away from the content you want them to see. A careful medium must be found when including flash. You must never rely solely on flash to display your content to a viewer. What if someone doesn't have the flash player plug-in installed or javascript is disabled which stops flash from being loaded. There must always be a web safe fall back.
Flash should only be used to enhance a users experience. Viewers of a site should not miss out on content if they are missing the plug-in. Currently Flash is not reliable when it comes to search engines reading your site as they can't open flash and extract content, this is also another reason why there should always be a web safe alternative. This allows people with slow internet connections or people using a mobile device to view your site quickly and still not miss out on anything. An example of how flash can enhance the users experience is using flash fonts. If you really like a certain font but it is not a web safe font, it is possible to embed the fontset into a Flash file and then get it to read the html of your site and display the text in the font you really like. This however requires that the viewer has flash installed, otherwise it will fall back to whatever font you have selected on your site.
TBC...
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