We often have clients who come to us asking for a smooth, stylish and beautifully sculpted website to promote their brand. When we ask for a couple of example websites to give us inspiration, we’re often provided with link to a beautiful site developed entirely in Adobe Flash. As developers, it can be difficult to explain the pros and cons of a site developed in Adobe Flash against one developed using HTML and CSS.

I think that the first and most important factor to enter into the decision is the purpose of the site. Adobe Flash is definitely more suited to business sectors where style and design is an important part of the brand. A beautiful layout and a eye-catching design can push sales, improve brand awareness and enhance the user experience for jewellery websites, fashion websites and music and film websites. For more corporate entities, functionality comes before form in importance. An estate agent website earns more trade by being easy to use, appearing high on search results, and being accessible from all mobile devices. Simply, the choice becomes a question of form or function.

On Aprilia Parts Buyer, you can see Flash utilised to enhance the user experience

Despite the growing selection of animation effects available to HTML 5 sites with canvas elements, it’s still not possible to achieve the same quality of effects and animation that is easy to achieve in Adobe Flash, such as the Bike Flow on the Aprilia Parts Buyer website. Online games and web based media streaming services still heavily rely on the functionality built into Adobe Flash. However, it’s important to notice that Adobe Flash websites have some considerable drawbacks. An Adobe flash site requires the user to have the Flash Player, and if they don’t have it or cannot install it, your site is inaccessible to them. iPhones, Windows phones and many Blackberry phones do not come with Flash installed, so a large percentage of the mobile userbase is immediately alienated from your website. If you have a mobile site or app as well as a Flash site, you can ensure that your user base can view your brand and product on any medium, while still maintaining a beautiful stylish website.

iPhone users know this means "You can't see Flash media"

I think it’s down to personal preference, you can always have a mixed website with sections, galleries and banners utilising Flash, so long as the rest of the site is usable and functional for users without Flash. I personally love the polish and finishing touches you can add to a website using Flash, and when applied to a jewellery or automotive site, it can make all the difference to your sales.

If it’s there, what’s it saying? “Click here if you’re bored, while we throw a few logos at you from a file that has been so badly actionscripted that it’s eating your bandwidth?”.

Don’t get me wrong, I love cool, well balanced Flash sites (and some designers, movie studios et al do them really well), but those that have a doorway page for the sake of it really need advising on the importance of their home page and a users dwell time.

Rant over.

Flash is a programme that creates a file (called an swf file) containing graphics and text that can provide far more movement, interactivity and sound than a standard HTML page.

In order for a Flash (swf) file to be shown within a browser it must have the correct plug-in installed on the users computer. This plug-in is usually pre-installed with browser software (up to 90% of computers connected to the internet have the latest Flash plug-in according to Macromedia), but can also be downloaded from the Macromedia website.

The way Flash files are programmed has a negative impact on search engine rankings, making it more difficult to acheive the rankings that HTML sites are able to attain. This is due to the fact that all textual data (that is searched upon by the search engines) is not as easily available as it is with pure HTML because all the keywords are embedded within the swf file.

However, integrating Flash files into the layout of a HTML page means Flash movies can still play a vital part in a website, without having an adverse effect on search rankings. Providing a huge potential for different aesthetic and function orientated objectives, including simple animations, video clips and music players that a user can control.

Most sites that use Flash, adopt the principle above. However, some more creative sites (especially those that are well known anyway) are not so concerned about SEO will have entire sites built in Flash – and with download speeds geting quicker and quicker, the ‘Skip Intro’ button hardly has time to appear anyway.

What is HTML?

HTML is the base language used to write the files needed in order to show a web page in a browser. The browser ‘reads’ the HTML code from top to bottom – displaying content as it scans the file. This content includes images, text and other objects within the code that the programmer has asked to be displayed.