hi all.

im new to webdesign, im just wondering what your opinions are of websites designed fully in Flash?

I do love playing with Flash, but i've heard that full sites designed this way are a bad idea!

Any advise would be most splended.

Thanks

It depends on your audience and also the content of your site to be honest. If you're building a site in flash just for the sake of it rather than considering who is going to view it and what it's purpose is then I would consider that to be a complete no-no.

hi all.

im new to webdesign, im just wondering what your opinions are of websites designed fully in Flash?

I do love playing with Flash, but i've heard that full sites designed this way are a bad idea!

Any advise would be most splended.

Thanks

Main consideration is SEO. Google loves text based sites rather than flash but if the site is excellent and gets a lot of hits, this will outweigh the SEO situation. Also consider that you can do a lot with javascript these days particularly under the spry framework and mootools etc.

Thanks guys. I heard something about the SEO situation, but thats cleared it up.

Cheers

You can make a site appear completely flash but not actually be.

ie. Flash header/logo area/menu then a flash footer but make the body text.

 

I personally do not care for completely flash sites.. flash "intros" and menus/headers are cool but the entire site being flash kind of takes away from the beauty of web design.

IMO the only value of flash these days is in creating advanced applications using Actionscript / Adobe Air or making 3D applications (Using something like flex or similar) or video applications or ad banners. The days of flash as 'eye candy only' are gone now I think (At least until Google Bot finds a way to index them properly).

iT ALL DEPENDS WHAT YOU WANT TO USE THE SITE FOR!!!!!

 

IF YOU WANT THE SEARCH ENGINES TO INDEX IT WELL THEN I WOULD AVOID FLASH, EMBED SMALL BITS OF FLASH IN THE PAGE AS APPOSED TO CREATING THE SITE WITH FLASH.

 

X

In spite of the fact that search engines don't index flash sites well, i like flash sites.

 

I think website looks much better if it contains flash intro or flash banner like these templates:

 

http://www.flash-intro-template.com/flash_..._templates.html

http://www.flash-intro-template.com/web_site_templates.html

I hate full-flash sites. In my experience, the more Flash is used, the less usable the site is. People who design full-flash sites seem to favour appearance and eye-candy over usability. Car manufacturers do it a lot, and I really hate it, I can never actually find the information I'm looking for. Often a full-flash site takes ages to load (even on 8Mb broadband) and sometimes fails to load properly at all, even after lots of refreshing. Navigation is rarely easy on a full flash site in my experience.

 

I don't like full flash sites!

I can't stand all Flash sites as a rule and hit the back button more times that looking at the site. Flash is for producing presentations and handling multimedia.

@Pendulum & bluedreamer - well said. Flash has its place - after all, animation is sometimes the best way to illustrate a concept (how a car engine or a steam train works, etc), and it's good for marketing presentations with a captive audience, but it doesn't often add real value or usability to a mainstream website, especially in navigation - imagine deliberately hiding all your internal links from Google!

 

And Flash intros... every time I see one, that's a few seconds of my life that I'll never get back

Absolutely ZigPress!

 

And with flash intros - don't you hate it when people put the skip link into the flash movie - Duh!

I can't say I hate flash sites.. Especially ones like http://www.2advanced.com/ where they have a lot of content that is easy to navigate.. pretty sure they even have bread crumbs so the back button woks. I think if they are done correctly they can be a great way to show off what you got.

 

and google doesn't seem to hate this site either.

Horses for courses & High horses.

 

Agree with most, still the most interesting thing I've come across;

 

Q: What don't you like on websites?

A: Flash intros

 

Q: Provide a link for a website you really like

A: www.linktowebsitewithflashintro.co.uk

 

Yep two of the people who said they didn't like flash intros provided links to sites with decent flash intros.

 

Flash is also good for streaming video, providing stills slideshows, animations etc.

 

Compare say lightbox or mootools with a flash slideshow. One gets to 98%+ and the other only to those with javascript enabled in their browser (neither perfect by the way). Don't something like 14% of web users have javascript disabled?

 

But not providing flash or javascript functionality is a bit like saying don't make colour television as some people still have black and white tv's. Where necessary of course.

 

What I'm interested in is - how many people of that 14% that have JS disabled are actually people...

If you want very few visitors, poorly ranked search engine results and what little visitors you do get to click off within 2 seconds.... build a fully flash website!!!

right then.

Cleared that up!

Thanks for your opinions guys, i think i'll stick with CSS etc.....

 

Well done!

What I'm interested in is - how many people of that 14% that have JS disabled are actually people...

 

A lot of corporate companies lock down web browsers, some more than others. It's common to find then blocking JS, Java and Flash as a matter of course.