Why Flash Is Bad & Why Flash Is Good

Since it first poked its head above the water, web developers, designers & marketers have argued over whether flash is the future of the web or whether it should be wiped off the planet. The rise of AJAX has softened this debate slightly & provided a third option, but flash is still used every day by people who don’t understand its limitations & is still cursed daily by those who don’t recognise its talents.

This article explains exactly what’s bad about flash, what’s good, and how best to use it…

Here’s What’s Bad About Flash:

1. It’s not search-friendly in the slightest
2. It doesn’t work well with the web-browser’s interface (the back button, the history, scrollbars, etc)
3. It usually has a definite start point - there’s often no potential for people to drop into ‘deep’ sections of a flash website. They have to enter via the ‘homepage’ & follow a path from there.
4. It’s tougher to measure (though that’s not always a bad thing, as it makes you think more deeply about /what/ you want to measure & /how/ you’ll measure it)
5. It’s less shareable. You often can’t email someone the link of (say) a product page within a flash site.
6. It’s less linkable. Just as the above point - say a blogger wants to refer to one of your products, they can’t just link directly to it (and thus you just lost out on a few new visitors & slightly better search results)
7. Still today, some people don’t have the flash plugin

Here’s What’s Great About Flash:

1. It can be remarkable: you can do things with flash that you just cannot do with HTML (even DHTML).
2. People love interactivity & Flash is fantastic for interaction.
3. It can create a fantastic brand impression: movement & interactivity are still impressive. Just think of some of the Nike sites over the years
4. It’s possible to create perfectly viable ‘fallback’ content if the visitor can’t/won’t see the flash version.
5. We’ve also reached the point where you can test for flash capability more reliably

How Do You Gain the Advantages Of Flash & Lose The Disadvantages?

Here’s the key to using flash well:

• Don’t build the entire site in flash, use it only for the highly interactive parts.
• If you’re going to insist on having the entire site in flash, then you should split this into constituent parts & make sure each section can be linked to directly
• Make sure every element of flash content has ‘fallback’ non-flash content which can be picked up by search engines & viewed by users who cannot (or choose not to) use the flash plugin