Flash has gained immense web popularity because it provides a convenient way to let web sites include interactive and animated movies, which could not have been possible otherwise. In the beginning, Flash made its mark because it provides advantages in two sectors; animated banner ads and Flash intros. Web designers considered Flash to be the latest, and that having Flash projected them as better designers.
Even though Flash movies as ad banners continues because of a high click thru rate as compared to static gifts, there is a marked and continuing decline in their usage. There are several reasons for this, and are all connected to the relative advantages and disadvantages of using animated Flash movies as web-site intros.
One of the reasons for the decreasing popularity of Flash intros is because it fails to fulfill any useful purpose. It is simply an animated visual presentation of appearing /disappearing images and text messages from various parts of the screen with all the animation and interactivity actually serving no particular purpose, in many cases not ever succeeding in attracting the visitor's attention.
Another disadvantage is that your homepage takes much more time to load when you use Flash intros. When you create a Flash intro, it surely has raster graphics, which increase the file size of the .swf file leading to a greater overall time to fully load your homepage. Now it would be too much to expect your time conscious visitor to keep waiting while your Flash intro gets loaded and then again go on to read your animated sales pitches. You know very well that had you been in the shoes of your visitor you would have just clicked out instead of waiting.
Embedding music and sound files in Flash intro movies increases their file sizes again leading to greater download time. Moreover, not every visitor is a music lover and even if he is, he may not like music forced upon him instead of being able to listen to what he prefers.
However, the biggest disadvantage of using a Flash intro is difficulty in being picked up by search engines, which cannot index text embedded in movies. It is also wrong to suppose that placing keywords in Meta tags or within HTML comment tags is going to overcome this problem as even an advanced search engine like Google faces problems indexing text and following links created in Flash movies.
All this is not to deny the advantages of Flash intros. If you use animation and interactive features properly, it certainly makes Flash catchy. Flash intros are a great way to thrill your visitors in case they have a lot of time on their hands. Another advantage with Flash intros is that if visitors are at a higher bandwidth or if they have time to let your intros to load you have a great opportunity to showcase your corporate objectives through a Flash intro as compared to a static page. It is also possible to build good interactive menus in a Flash intro. These menus tend to serve as excellent navigation guides for the site's human visitors.
Peter Brittain is a director of northland digital agency which owns web design company slinky web design.
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