The Truth About Flash

We all love the animation and user experience power of flash, but there might be some things you don't know about it. Don't get me wrong, it has its uses and the possibilities it allows you to achieve are pretty staggering. However sometimes the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. Lets go over some of those drawbacks

• First off did you know that it is nearly impossible to guarantee that everyone everywhere will be able to even see the content within a flash application? If you built your entire site on flash and your viewers don't have the latest flash plugin installed then they don't get to see the website at all. You put time and effort into creating that wonderful animated site and then a small fraction of your users don't even get to see it. Sounds like a waste of time to me.
  
• Search engines can't even see the content within a flash application. Search Engine Optimization is an important factor in today's marketplace. We have to make sure that the search engine crawlers get to our site, index all the pages, and retrieve information about our site that is easy for users to find. Well unless you plan on using some black hat CSS tricks to serve up two different versions of the site (one to bots and one to human viewers) then your entire site just looks blank to the search engines. Black Hat refers to a hacker who is using unscrupulous methods to achieve his goal. You definitely don't want to use black hat hacks...do you?
  
• Flash applications can be made into Content Management Systems, however this is typically more difficult to do and requires a great Flash Programmer. Whereas those of us building straight HTML website can utilize already existing CMS software to save you Time and Money over the competition. EZ Web Secrets is all about saving you Time and Money, and we plan on teaching you how to utilize Joomla, Wordpress and other pre-existing CMS softwares to build your site quickly and efficiently without falling into any of these "flash pitfalls".
  

There aren't a lot of negatives, but each bullet point is a big reason not to use Flash. I don't use it my coding simply because I am a SEO nazi, and I don't like anything that can't be indexed by the search engines. However I still can produce quality animated content by utilizing the jQuery Javascript library. jQuery allows me to animate html elements in a lot of the same ways that Flash does. With Flash you typically have a visual editor, but with jQuery you have to know how to code to make things happen the way you want them to. Considering I can read code better then some people can read english, it works for me.

What are your thoughts and opinions on Flash? let me know in the comments section below.