Please take a look at one of our past Flash projects; Media Sourcing required an interactive demonstration of their production process, past products and on-line quote system demo. Our brief was to build a fun and quirky interface, best done in Flash.

We often produce Flash web banners for the promotion of our customer’s sites on other sites; please take a look at some of our past projects.

This decision should be based on your company’s target audience and the type service or product you are trying to promote. We have outlined some the advantages and disadvantages for having a flash rich site below and this should help you with your decision.

Used as a tool to present a media based product, Flash is second to none, but the vast majority of web sites will not benefit from using it. Flash is ideally suited to visually rich presentations or platforms that require a high level of interactivity.

It’s worth remembering that most people surf the web to gain quality information, fast and are often not impressed by a fancy flash presentation. How many times have you come across a Flash based website, and had to wait for something to bounce repeatedly across the page? Annoying isn’t it. For that reason it is crucial that Flash is used in the correct context and not just for the sake of it.

We think by far the best compromise for most companies is a HTML based site with Flash used where appropriate, this way you can benefit from traditional Search engine optimisation techniques but still get the visual flair of Flash.

The primary advantage of Flash is that if used correctly can really enhance the visitor experience and provide elements such as animation, interactivity and audio that cannot be so easily achieved with an HTML website.

Flash provides us with a great deal of control over the final design, and enables the creation of features and environments that are more difficult to reproduce in a standard HTML web site.

To enable end users of the internet to view Flash movies or files, their browser needs to have a flash plug-in. All the major web browsers now ship with a flash plug-in already installed. The latest figures suggest that 85% of web users are able to view flash content.

Flash websites can actually be built with incredibly small files, and therefore download much faster than other visuals. If your site is going to be mainly media based or visually rich then flash could be a good way to build it.

The main disadvantage of Flash is that the content is not currently indexed by search engines. If you are a new company trying to promote your site via search engines, then a completely flash based website is a no go. Some search engines are moving more towards indexing media such as Flash, but still at present the major player Google does not display Flash content in its search results.
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Every Flash website requires a plug-in to view it. Although most people (around 85%) have this facility and this figure is growing by the day, it still leaves 15% of all web users that would need to download the Flash plug-in. If they haven’t done this already the chances are they will not bother with your site either.

Used inappropriately, Flash design has an amazing ability to be a serious annoyance to website visitors - and this explains much of it’s bad press over the years.

This actually need not be the case as this is the fault of the designer rather than Flash itself, although there is certainly a section of people who will hit their back button at the slightest glimpse of a Flash loading bar or a Flash intro animation.