Why Wait Webs

One of my most popular services is my ability to work with Flash. I believe in Flash, and what it can do. But that’s not what this article is about. Just because I believe in and use something doesn’t mean it’s the end-all, be-all to web design and development! In fact, Flash has a TON of downsides that I think should be taken into consideration every time you’re thinking about using Flash on your website.

The logo for Adobe Flash CS4

For those of you who don’t know, Adobe Flash, formerly Macromedia Flash (and before that, “FutureSplash”), is a web plugin technology. Developers make animations, games, and other media using any of the Flash Authoring Environments (most notably Flash itself). The end-user downloads the plugin for their browser, and then views the content integrated or embedded into the page.

Flash has been around for quite a while now, and through the years it has been used for animation, games, all kinds of other interactive media, and even full-on websites or web applications. Rightly or wrongly, Flash has been adopted by both consumers and developers as the standard for all of these things. This is evidenced by the fact that today 99 out of 100 Internet-capable computers have Flash plugin installed (statistic provided by Adobe).

Both designers and business owners alike should seriously weigh their options when it comes to implementing Flash as part or all of their website.

Some of Flash’s Benefits

• What you see is what you get - Across all browsers and operating environments, your Flash document will always appear and behave the same. Because everything is run through the same plugin, there is very little worry that a minor bug in some obscure browser is going to wreak havoc on your design. As of a few years ago, all browsers are relatively decent in supporting web standards (even Internet Explorer has come a long way), so this isn’t as big of a deal. But back in the day, getting a website to look the same in every environment was all but impossible, so this was a HUGE win for Flash, and to a certain degree, it still is.
• Everyone’s doing it - As I mentioned before, about 99% of the Internet-using population has Flash Player. For a third-party browser that doesn’t come pre-installed on most systems, this is extremely impressive. As a matter of fact, it may be the only plugin that web developers can generally rely on the end-user having. Of course, don’t forget to take into consideration your target demographic; for example, a Flash-based site targeted at the elderly is probably a bad idea.
• Quick and easy development - I don’t mean to imply that Flash is easy (though for some it may well be), but once you know how to use it, many common tasks can be accomplished very quickly. For example, setting up a simple audio player in Flash is trivial. This can be a huge draw, as when you are looking at 20 minutes of development time versus 4-6 hours, it’s hard to come out in favor of spending the extra time. Especially when, to the end user, it will look and work exactly the same.
• Expandability - People don’t tend to think about Flash as expandable, but truly it is. Flash can communicate with Javascript, PHP, and many other popular web languages. Using a combination of these is often a very robust solution, with PHP or another powerful language as the driving force behind a beautiful Flash-based user interface.
• It’s just plain slick - To be quite honest, Flash is candy for designers. It makes it incredibly easy to animate and do some pretty slick-looking things, all with very little to no code. Much of Flash is done visually, and though many developers may prefer to hack out an animation in JavaScript, designers tend to prefer the visual approach: draw an object, scrub the timeline forward a few frames, make a keyframe and move the object. Now put a tween it and without any code at all, you’ve got a smooth animation.

But as I’ve already alluded to, this bed of roses has its share of thorns.

Some of Flash’s Weaknesses

An all-flash site for Susan Adams. Sometimes, your objectives allow some wiggle room in terms of Flash. In Susan's case, most of her visitors would come from direct page loads, so the lesser Google ranking wasn't an issue. Additionally, the simplistic graphics lent themselves well to a low-filesize Flash file. Link opens a new window.

• Search engine incompatible - We’ll start out with the grandaddy of Flash’s weaknesses. Though recently some of the larger search engines have announced the ability to crawl Flash-based websites, it simply isn’t the same. Sure, it reads and indexes all the text in your document, but you don’t have the same search engine optimization techniques available to you as with plain HTML. You can’t define headlines, or unimportant footnotes. You can’t give it alt text to describe your images (for that matter, it can’t see your images at all). In essence, you can’t tell the GoogleBot what’s important on your page, so it assumes that your whole page is unimportant. For this one reason, I almost always frown upon all-Flash websites.
• Performance issues - Flash doesn’t always perform well. Depending on a number of factors, including the end-user’s system specs, how many other programs they have running, and even what OS they are running (Flash simply doesn’t perform as well on a Mac as it does on a Windows PC), your user may experience lag. There are of course many things you can do to optimize your file, but in the end, you don’t have control over whether their machine can handle the beating. Even if they have Flash installed (and chances are extremely high that they do), their browser may crash if you try to throw too much at it. I’ll let you guess whether or not they’ll be back if that happens.
• Bandwidth - Performance issues may not be such a big deal if you expect your target audience has reasonable decent hardware. But even with ubiquitous high-speed Internet, Flash can take a while to download, making your website load slowly. Flash can be very bandwidth-intensive at times, and file-size can quickly get out of hand. If you’re going to use Flash, you have to constantly keep your bandwidth in check.
• Disabled back button - Sites which are built entirely in Flash have another inherent problem - the back button doesn’t work. Since all the pages are inside the Flash file, pressing back just takes the user to wherever they came from before they got to your site. When they try to use the back button only to find themselves back at their search results, they may not be willing to take the extra effort to return to your site.
• 99% isn’t 100% - Yes, most of the world has Flash. But what about the rest? You have to decide whether whatever you’re trying to accomplish with Flash is worth losing 1% of your users right off the bat. As mentioned, your site’s target demographic is key. If your site targets the blind or others with disabilities, then by all means stay away from Flash! Screen readers and the like are often unable to recognize Flash, rendering the website useless to individuals who make use of such software.
• It’s proprietary - To some, the fact that Flash is proprietary makes it an unappealing choice. I’m a capitalist, through and through, and I couldn’t care less that Flash is proprietary. The way I see it, you use the tool that works the best, and who makes that tool is irrelevant unless they’ve committed horrible crimes against humanity. Of course, it’s debatable what exactly that entails, and some would have you believe that Adobe’s plugin is an immoral monopoly. I’ll leave this one up to you to decide for yourself.

A number of my websites, including Why Wait Webs, had their graphics made in Flash. This isn't what we're discussing here, but rather the use of the Flash Plugin. If you feel more comfortable constructing graphics in Flash to be exported to HTML, go for it! Flash is a fantastic vector illustration app.

This article isn’t entitled “5 Reasons Not to Use Flash”. Nor is this “Why Flash is the Best Tool for Every Job”. What I’d like you to take away from this is that Flash has its time and place just like most everything else, but that time and place isn’t everywhere. Too many developers rely so heavily on Flash that they’re appalled by the idea of a pure HTML site! I see Flash used in all the wrong places, from simple animations that could be accomplished much smother with jQuery or good ol’ Javascript, to full-on Flash websites that have so many downsides it’s not even funny.

Hopefully we’ll agree on this: if there is another way to accomplish it, then it’s only fair to compare the pros and cons of each method and make an informed decision. In many situations that decision will be in favor of Flash. Much of the time, it will not.

I think it really comes down to a question that you have to ask yourself: is Flash really the best option? If you’re adding it to make a more dynamic and better experience for the end-user, and there’s not another way of doing it, then maybe Flash IS the best choice for your situation. But if you’re doing it to show off your skills, or just to make your website appear flashy (no pun intended), then chances are you are making the wrong decision. There are better ways to build a website if “impressive” is what you’re going for, and I don’t think “impressive” is going to be the word resounding in your viewer’s mind when your site starts lagging because they’re running some other processes (or simply because you’ve failed to properly optimize your Flash).

Thanks for reading! Now that we’ve cleared that up, it’s safe to say Flash has plenty of viable uses. If you’re interested in learning about how to create great Flash content, be sure to check out the wealth of tutorials at CartoonSmart. Perhaps ironically, their site is just the kind of all-Flash site I’m trying to discourage here, but seeing as it’s a Flash tutorial site, I suppose that can be forgiven.

If you click the provided link and buy one of CartoonSmart’s excellent tutorials, I will receive an affiliate fee. Rest assured that I was recommending CartoonSmart long before they offered any sort of referral fee, and if the referral URL makes you uncomfortable, feel free to hit up CartoonSmart.com directly.

Again, thanks for reading. More articles to come, so check back regularly (or subscribe to my feed)!