What is Flash, and Should I Use it?
Flash is a technology which is used by Web pages to add visual media such as videos and animations. It was first introduced back in 1996, and since then has become the industry standard, with popular sites such as YouTube relying on Flash to deliver content. Most computers will have some version of Flash player installed.
A company called FutureWave Software released a program called SmartSketch in 1993 which could be used to create computer graphics. In 1995 they developed this further to enable frame animation and changed the name to FutureSplash Animator. When the company was taken over by Macromedia in 1996 the software was again developed further and renamed Macromedia Flash 1.0. The software retained this name until the company was again taken over in 1995, this time by Adobe. The current version which was released in 2007 is called Adobe Flash CS3, and this is usually found as part of the Adobe Creative Suite 3 software package.
The decision of whether or not to add Flash to your Web site is not a simple one, as although there are advantages of doing so, there are also some possible disadvantages.
One of the main attractions for developers in adding Flash to a site is that it can really make the site look terrific. If you have a site where the animation is a key focus element then it can actually become one of the main reasons that visitors come to the site.
Flash does however use a significant amount of bandwidth. This may not be so much of a problem if you are on a hosting plan with a large bandwidth allowance and will not really matter if your hosting includes unlimited bandwidth. If you are on a restricted hosting plan, however, then you will probably need to upgrade your package to be able to include Flash on your site.
The increased amount of bandwidth which your site will use will also affect the download time for your site. Broadband is becoming more and more popular, with more than three quarters of the U.S. population expected to have it installed by 2012. At the moment however it is worth considering that there may still be a significant number of households using dial-up access, and Flash can make your site painfully slow to download for those people.
One of the most important considerations at the moment though is that including Flash on your site may adversely affect your rankings in the search engines. The design of Flash pages means that there is very little HTML code in them, which leaves little for the spiders to crawl that are sent out by the search engines. This is something which is recognized in the industry as being a major problem and is something which is being investigated. As things stand though search engines are generally not good at indexing Flash-based sites.
In general, taking into account everything explained here, it would generally be advised that Flash is something which you should use only if it is appropriate for the content of your site. If you have a standard ecommerce store which is not aimed at technology then you probably would not really benefit from using Flash. If on the other hand you are an animator that wants to showcase their work then it would clearly be a very good idea to include Flash on your site and employ some other tactics to overcome the issues, for example by using Flash only on certain pages of your site and ensuring that you have a really good hosting package.