Flash Development Overview
We first encountered Flash when it was ‘Future Splash’, just before it was bought by Macromedia 10 years ago. Our estimation hasn't changed in that time: vector based, programmable for the web, what could be a better idea?
We started using it straight away and have been making flash games and animations ever since. We use flash to:
- Create flash banner ads or eyeblaster ads
- Add animation and interactivity to websites
- Make games and quizzes for fun or educational websites
- Create animated diagrams for websites or presentations
- Make effective, easy to transfer animations for digital signage
- Create lightweight interfaces for interactive kiosks
Flash game for Ministry of Health sexual health campaign
Go to the Drawing Board (requires Flash Player 7)
We don’t generally advise using Flash for navigation on websites: There are several reasons for this:
- Although some search engines can read the text in flash, our tests have shown that they don't rate it. This means that your website will rate poorly,* if at all, when people search for it using the keywords which should be in your navigation. For more about improving search engine rankings visit www.webstrategy.co.nz.
- The web is not like a magazine; people view it in entirely different ways, so they need to be able to adjust the size of the text and screen to suit. Many of us access the web from phones or other mobiles with small screens. Some of us use our TV's as a way to share the Internet at home – I can confirm that you definitely need to adjust the text size to see a website on TV from the couch across the room.
- Large companies often do not allow their employees to download or update plug-ins. Currently in New Zealand this means that a reasonable proportion of visitors to your site are unable to view current flash content.
For banners, diagrams, or animations, we can easily replace the flash file with an image for those who don't have the plug-in and they can still enjoy the experience. Replacing navigation is not generally cost effective, so people without the plug-in will not be able to experience the site properly, or possibly at all. - There's a whole lot we can do without Flash, and we save Flash for the things it does better than anything else.
* (Adobe agrees with us: "When your site requires whole paragraphs of text, you're better off putting it in the HTML, both from a search engine perspective and a user experience perspective. You can still use Flash animations on this page, of course; many pages seamlessly integrate Flash and HTML to the point that it can be quite difficult to tell where the Flash ends and the HTML begins." http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/flash_searchability.html )
As always there are exceptions to the rule. If you are sure your users will have the flash plug-in, and you feel the benefits of Flash are essential to your brand, it may be worth making your whole website in Flash.
Get Flash Player
