Adding Flash Attractiveness & Interactivity to your Website

To enhance website’s attractiveness and incorporate the element of interactivity to it, adding flash is a wise idea. Learning and hence writing the flash language to add animations and different forms is however complicated for website developers. Those who are expert in this field, they use flash in almost every situation. However it does carry a number of drawbacks and may backfire in certain instances. The pros and cons must be considered.

Flash is quite a powerful tool which increases your website visits to a great extent. It’s important to realize that it shouldn’t be used for each and every situation.

Why Use Flash

Flash gives you the benefit to use different fonts for your website. At times designers are looking for special fonts while developing a website therefore they gain from this experience. Through using image replacement technique known as SIRF, the designers enable themselves to replace text with special font that is available with flash. Once of the greatest gains to use flash involves vector graphics. These types of graphics make your website look more attractive, smooth and organized. By using this vector graphic tool, website designers can easily make applications through smoother lines. To enable its use, the tool must be installed on website designer’s hard drive.

Since flash is not like AJAX, designers can add games to the websites without any issue of browser support. Also there are no bandwidth restrictions such as server side games written in CGI. Flash applications also allow videos to smoothly run on websites. Those websites that do not allow videos to be run on their website ask for a separate plugin like QuickTime or Media Player. Flash websites only require a flash plugin.

Drawbacks of using Flash

Downloading a flash website is quite time consuming due to the extent of information stored on it. This can be reduced if website developer works on optimizing the flash code. There are instances where entire website download is required in order for the readers to access it. Many people find it a waste of time to keep waiting for the website content to download despite the addition of graphical countdowns or any similar aspects.

Websites designed in flash have pictures and videos that make it difficult for them to be ranked on the search engine because search engines are not capable of reading them but text. These websites find it difficult to follow links other than HTML links. Because of this reason, website owners have a second website designed without flash so that it can rank high in search engines.

Websites developed in flash do not require a plugin except when the browsers they are being run in do not support flash. Since many internet users might not have their browsers well supported with automatic flash installations and many companies do not allow flash plugins on computers, this may come across as a major drawback in visiting flash websites on a regular basis.