Pros and Cons of Flash | Flash- Bit by Bit

Creative agencies and big brands swear by it. It’s powerful, easy to use and even celebrities love it to display their creative side. Yes, we are talking about the mighty Flash here and what it brings to the table. There is a lot of word in the air about the good old Flash; some of it good, some of it bad. So, it would be good to clear the air once in for all. So, let’s get it started.



PROS

• Simple : Flash is one of the simplest of tool for using animation. This is one of the features that made it the favorite child of professional web designing companies. One can create interactive movies, animation and menus by making use of the tool without breaking a sweat. This contributed to its popularity a lot.
• Browser Independent : Flash can viewed at ease in any browser and operating system if the Flash plug-in is present. This makes it a great tool at the hands of designers that want to catch attention of the visitors without worrying about the browser compatibility.
• Widely used for Site Intros :Ask any professional web design company about Flash and it would surely mention the point that it is well accepted for site intros. For homepage too, Flash is widely used by professionals all over the world to leave a lasting memory.

CONS
However, there are a number of points that often make professional web design firms doubtful about using Flash in critical projects. Some of the crucial ones are:

• Bots Can’t Crawl Flash : Search engines could play crucial role in bring the desired traffic to a website because people nowadays go straight to Google to post a query rather than filing the web address space. Here, Flash fails miserably because its images cannot be crawled by bots. Even text in images has very little chance of getting indexed. This is one of the major reasons designers think twice before putting Flash into practice.
• Flash Increases Load Time :This is a universally accepted fact. Websites that are heavily dependent on Flash takes aeon to download. In a world where time has become the most precious commodity, how can a website afford to be struck in limbo? Visit Jim Carrey’s official site and you would know what we mean.

These are the main points that make Flash score low. However, this doesn’t mean Flash is not a useful tool. It is a valuable tool in the hands of a professional web development company because experts know where to draw the line of Flash usage and get all the advantages it has to offer.
That said, here are some of the points that might come handy in Flash usage.

• First, if using Flash for homepage, keep the option of ‘Skip Intro’ to keep the visitor from running away.
• Second, if you need an all Flash website, make sure to create an alternative site in HTML for web crawlers too.
• Lastly, please no music. It is a global turnoff!

That’s all.
Content Resource: http://mohil.typepad.com