While it is very difficult, if not impossible, to get your email address off of these spam lists once you are on them, you can stop email spam for the most part by being careful with your email address from the beginning. If you have a new email address or an address that receives very little Spam, following these guidelines will help you keep it that way:

• Don’t make purchases from companies you do not trust. - Many companies build their lists by purchasing emails from other companies who have sold something to that individual.
• Stay far away from websites that offer free iPads or other up-scale electronics in exchange for your email address, recruitment, or signing up for offers. They are not always scams (although that often is the case), but they do make their money by selling your email address. This is the single fastest way to get signed up to literally hundreds of spam lists. If you absolutely must participate in one of these, I highly advise using a secondary or “throw-away” email address.
• Avoid signing up for free email newsletters, unless you are genuinely interested in the content. Some will tempt you with a free offer, and there is nothing wrong with that if you are interested, but sometimes they can be difficult to get back off.
• Do not list your email on any website. Ideally, use a web form, so that no one can find your email address from the site. But if you feel it is necessary to include an actual email address, you should use one separate from your normal work and use an image instead of text so that spam robots will not pick it up as quickly. I speak more on the details of this in How to Publish Your Email Address.

Despite your best efforts, you may still eventually end up getting at least a little bit of spam in your inbox. When you do, I highly recommend you follow these guidelines, or you could find yourself swimming in spam before you know it. Stop the flow of spam before it begins by:

• Avoid opening the spam emails at all. Just loading it up is enough to alert the spammers that your email is actually read by a real person. If you can, disable automatic image loading with your email provider so that you can preview it without loading the images that will detect it being read.
• The last thing you want to do is click a link in any of these emails. This includes the unsubscribe link, which will almost never actually unsubscribe you, and may indeed increase the flow of spam.
• Same goes for replying to these emails, it is not a good idea. Chances are no one will read it, and it will just be detected as proof that your email is real.
• Any bulk email without a legitimate, working unsubscribe link is in violation of the law. Sadly it is a law nearly impossible to enforce. Although it is unlikely to have much effect, you can try forwarding the spam (still avoid loading any images!) to the FTC, who claims to use forwarded email to prosecute deceptive Spam email. Their email is spam@uce.gov, and normally I wouldn’t put it out for spam bots to access, but I have a feeling they wouldn’t mind for this particular email!

That’s it for the tips on stopping the flow of spam to your email inbox. I will try to keep adding more helpful tips on this blog more frequently. Let me know in comments if you have any questions about these methods, or another tip to contribute to people looking to stop getting spam emails.

Practically everything I know about video game development, and many of my other skills, came from tutorials over at CartoonSmart. I can say from first-hand experience that these are absolutely fantastic tutorials that will have you cranking out great content in no time! So, if you want to get into video game creation, what better time than now? Click away to some of the best game-making tutorials out there.

If you have any comments about CartoonSmart, or want to share any other resources you have found to be helpful, feel free to post a comment!

Why Wait Webs indexed on first page of Google thanks to having search-engine friendly content.

We have all seen websites, books, and seminars dedicated to one of today’s hottest topics: search-engine optimization. There is a lot of information out there, a lot of it helpful, and a lot of it completely bogus or largely fluff. If you are new to the subject of SEO, the plethora of information available about writing content for search engines can be quite daunting.

Fortunately when it comes right down to it, one of the most consistent, tried and true methods of search engine optimization is simply writing search-engine friendly content, which is something anyone can do if they follow a couple very simple techniques. By the end of this short article, you should be able to write search-engine friendly content that will allow your website to get indexed by Google and the other search engines much more effectively.

Search engines function off of keywords. The user types in a few words or a phrase related to what they are looking for, and they are given results based on that information. So before you even begin to write the content, come up with a list of key words and key phrases related to your topic. When building your list, put yourself into the end-users’ shoes. The question to ask is: what would I type into a search box if I was looking for this information? The more specific and relevant your keywords are, the more targeted your audience will be, but be careful! Too specific and you will narrow your potential audience.

Once you have a somewhat sizable list, choose one of your best key-phrases and make it your title/header. The best key-phrase is going to be the one people are most likely to type into a search engine when seeking your product, information, or service. Depending on how popular your key-phrase is, using this as your page’s header will almost automatically make your page rank among the top results for that key-phrase. And we haven’t even begun to optimize the content!

When writing the content, the most important thing is that it makes sense to the end user. Even if you can get a million people to click through to your website, they’re just going to leave if it doesn’t make sense to them. So while keeping that element of human-readability, try to include your top few key phrases several times throughout the content, and use your keywords as much as possible as well. You’ll notice this particular article has phrases like “search-engine friendly content” and “writing content for search engines” (and variations thereof) scattered throughout it.

Chances are, if you have picked proper key words and phrases with which to optimize your content, there will be plenty of natural places for you to include them. Just having written the list will likely cause you to include them while writing. But don’t go overboard. Things like straight out lists of keywords with no context or meaning do nothing for you on Google or most other search engines, since the search engine companies have implemented advanced rules to keep people from doing this.

Your best bet when writing content for search engines is to write the content in a human-friendly way, while using repetition of keywords and phrases. This one simple tactic can single-handedly earn you a #1 spot on google for certain searches, and will be effective in generally raising your ranking for all of the keywords you have included.

Writing good copy is just one portion of search engine optimization, and there are many things that can be done behind the scenes to improve your results, which you should ask your web designer about. However, search-engine friendly content is perhaps the simplest most pain free way of optimizing your site, and search-engine friendly content can go a very long way to making your site climb the ranks on Google. Following the tips I’ve outlined in this guide, you should have some solid copy and a list of keywords which can be used for a variety of other purposes as well, from tagging your site and other content, to purchasing advertisements on search engines. The whole process should take less than an hour, and often can be done in five or ten minutes. But the effects of this small preparation will do wonders for your site ranking.

If you have any questions about optimizing your content, or anything to add to what I’ve said, please feel free to sound off in the comments! Thanks for reading, and look forward to more articles on search engine optimization and other website-related topics in the near future!

WebKit, the rendering engine that has brought CSS3's explicit animation to the web for the first time!

Today we as web designers and developers get a rare chance to look into the future. The latest nightly build of Webkit (the rendering engine for browsers Apple Safari and Google Chrome) includes some new support for CSS3. Specifically, explicit animations using CSS. Up until now, developers have either had to rely on Flash and all its drawbacks, or bite the bullet and write out a long piece of JavaScript just to get a box to slide in elegantly. JQuery alleviated the problem somewhat, but nothing compares to the visual approach of writing a CSS document.

CSS animation will enable developers to spend much less time on animation which, to the end user, may seem trivial. And it will do so with cleaner, simpler, more robust code that will load significantly faster and run smoother for the end user. Read on to see a preview of how it works, and when you can expect to be able to use this on an actual web page.

So, How Does it Work?

CSS3’s animation works using keyframes, and the browser calculates the in-between frames. So say you want to make a box move from the left side to the right side of the screen. You will tell CSS what the box looks like at point A, and what it looks like at point B, using code that looks something like this:

@-webkit-keyframes bounce {
from {
left: 0px;
}
to {
left: 200px;
}
}

Then you will tell the browser what element to apply it to, how long the duration of the effect is, how many times it should repeat, and which direction it should go. These parameters will change depending on what animation type you are using, but for bounce, the code will look something like this:

div {
-webkit-animation-name: bounce;
-webkit-animation-duration: 4s;
-webkit-animation-iteration-count: 10;
-webkit-animation-direction: alternate;
}

But Can We Actually Use It?

Don’t get over-excited just yet, though. When it comes right down to it, all the cool stuff CSS animation can do is only useful if it’s adopted by browsers, and right now, the only browser that can do this is the WebKit nightly build. Still, for someone like me who has relied on Flash and Javascript in the past, seeing this working and in-action is a spectacular experience! I am witnessing plain, search-engine-friendly text rotating from side to side, background colors changing before my eyes, even dozens of images moving simultaneously without bogging my computer down in the slightest, and most importantly, without any hacks involved.

The question remains however, when will we be able to actually implement CSS animation on our websites? In my opinion, it is likely to be very soon. While it’s true that Microsoft has historically taken 5-10 years to implement features that become standard on all other browsers, this particular trick degrades quite nicely. That is to say, even though Internet Explorer might not support CSS animation until IE10 comes out in the year 2018, a page with CSS animation on it will still look decent in IE - it just won’t be animated. Other major browsers like Safari and Firefox will probably support it much sooner, and web developers can and should begin to use CSS animation as soon as that is the case.

The code examples here and most of this information was gleaned from WebKit’s own blog about CSS explicit animation. They also have some more in-depth information about how it works, and links to live examples that you can view if you download the nightly build of WebKit. And if you’re a developer, that’s not a bad thing anyway - WebKit’s Web Inspector is the best debugging tool I’ve ever used (it squashes Firebug like… well, a bug).

Now that you know a little about CSS animation, and hopefully got a chance to see it in action, let me know your thoughts on it! Are you excited for the new possibilities? Are you scared that pulse will become the new blink and ravage the web in a repeat of the 1990s? Fire away in the comments!

IE6 Showing its True Malevolent Self

Today I found the strangest and most terrible bug I’ve ever encountered. In Internet Explorer 6, my main content was completely invisible. Images and text alike were simply gone! The container DIV was stretched out as it would be if the content were there, and the text was selectable! If I highlighted the text, in fact, I was able to see it, even after de-selecting it. On a page refresh however, my content would simply disappear again, only to reappear when highlighted.

I consider this the most terrible bug ever because in most cases, a bug will rearrange your website, or make it look ugly, but users will still be able to access the content. The content is the reason for the site’s existence, and with this disappearing content bug, users of Internet Explorer 6 will not see your content unless they think to highlight it (and in that particular demographic, I’m willing to bet the odds of that are pretty low). Thus your entire site is rendered unusable and pointless. So read on for the fix!

It took only a small amount of research to get to the bottom of it — for what else could one call this bug, besides the IE6 Disappearing Content Bug? It is exactly as you might have guessed, a simply programming oversight, a glitch in the matrix, if you will. From my research no one has ever fully determined the cause, but essentially the use of floats in certain instances will cause your content to hide itself.

The Fix

It was simple enough to fix the bug, and ensure that my content was not hidden, did not disappear, and rendered properly in all circumstances (that I was able to test, anyway). First I applied position:relative; to the DIV that contained my content. Note that the DIV itself was not floated, though there were some floated divs inside of it. Which brings me to the next step, for now that my text was showing up, the floated elements below it which had previously appeared just fine were now hidden. So I tried the same thing again, applying position:relative; to the floated DIVs themselves. Worked like a charm!

In my instance, things all worked out okay like this, and if it’s possible, your disappearing content problems should be solved by applying position:relative; to all affected DIVs or other elements (as far as I know, DIVs are most common). But what if the DIV or element with hidden content is required to be positioned differently than relative? Well, I found a page that described a few other workarounds, although I haven’t tested them myself. Here they are:

The first of these includes wrapping paragraph tags around your floated elements. Yet again, this can cause problems sometimes. Putting an extra paragraph tag is also unfortunate, as it adds an unnecessary and unmeaningful element to the page, which is always a bad thing if semantics are important to you (and they should be, but that’s a topic for another day).

The final workaround I found involves removing the background property from upper-level DIVs. In most cases, however, this won’t work. In my case I had both background-image and background-color set, and both were needed. That said however, if none of the other workarounds would have worked for me, I would have experimented with wrapping an extra DIV around the content — one with no background. I have no idea if this will work or not, but regardless, it’s another unnecessary element on your page and comes dangerously close to Divitus. But if it’s the only way to get the job done and force your content to reappear and stay, it may just be a necessary element after all.

If none of these workarounds work for you, then unfortunately, as is frequently the case with IE6, you may have to rethink your layout a bit in order to get around this. Aside from that, all we can do is hope and pray that the remaining 20% or so of people will either upgrade to IE7, or ideally anything else.

If you happen to know of another workaround, or have anything else to say about this, fire away in the comments!

I am going to be upgrading this blog and, if all goes well, my clients’ blogs shortly thereafter. Normally I wouldn’t go to the trouble of updating, but this is a big one. Instead of the usual one or two obscure bug fixes, the WP team has completely redesigned the back-end, and from what I’ve seen they’ve done a really good job of turning a great blogging platform into a truly rich CMS (content management system).

Continue reading to find out what some of these great new features are, and for a video showcasing them!

In WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” the look and feel of the back-end is very much improved. The most important thing, in my opinion, is that you can now access important pages with a single click. Previously, the menu/sub-menu setup often required you to click once, wait for the page to load, and then click again to get where you needed to be (even “New Post” was not always instantly accessible). Now, not only have they implemented some robust JavaScript into their menu so that you can get pretty much anywhere from any page, they have also implemented the ability to add shortcuts of your own choosing to your Dashboard. So if there does happen to be some obscure feature in WP that would normally take 2 or more clicks, and you happen to use it a lot, you can still add a shortcut and now you’re able to easily access any page you desire from anywhere in the WordPress CMS.

Another feature, and the one that is getting the most attention, is that the interface is completely customizable. You can get rid of elements in the CMS that you don’t need. If you don’t ever use password protection on your posts for example, you can get rid of the box that takes up your workspace. You can also move things around. Let’s say that you want some extra width-space for typing out your posts. With 2.7, you can move the Preview, Save, Publish, and other buttons that normally occupy the right side of the screen down below your post if you prefer. 2-column or 1-column, it’s all up to you.

Also, they have included a plugin browser in the new CMS. Previously, if you wanted a plugin you had to find it through one of many directories on the web, download it, unzip it, upload it, and activate it. Now not only is all of that automated, but there is a single central place for you to look for plugins (I can’t help but think they might have drawn some inspiration from Apple’s highly successful iPhone App Store, but that is pure speculation).

And the last major addition that I’ll point out here is that from now on, upgrades won’t be such a hassle. The WP team has implemented a one-click upgrade system, which will turn the daunting 2+ hour task of upgrading, which was actually even more complicated than a completely fresh install of WordPress, into a single-click ordeal.

Sounds like a lot of great updates to me! I’m including the video from WordPress’s own blog for you to preview these new features and decide for yourself whether it’s worth the upgrade. Let me know what you decide in the comments!

Apple, developer of Mac OS X

Ok, it’s true. I am a big fan of Apple products. I do most of my work on a 24 inch iMac, and I find myself using my iPhone constantly throughout the day. I like these products because I’ve tried the alternatives, and I have found that for me, these are by far the best solutions. However, even though I’m a fan of Macs, I would never condone a website that doesn’t support PCs. I believe that right now, there is no reason why EVERYTHING computers can do shouldn’t be done cross-platform. That means OS X, and even Linux.

You see, applications and websites that are built from the ground up with these smaller platforms in mind don’t take any extra effort. Supporting an extra 12% or so of the market is easy to do, but yet so few developers do it. I came across an excellent article today about why game developers should support Mac OS X and Linux. But the concept extends beyond just game developers. Software developers of any kind, including website developers, should take heed to this information. Continue reading to see why.

The other day, I was very dismayed to find that the website of the Utah Food Bank denies access to Safari users, stating that they’re “Sorry for any inconvenience, our website is not compatible with Safari browser.” My first thought was, “why?” Safari is a fully standards-compliant browser, and there are VERY few instances where a page that displays in Firefox or Internet Explorer won’t also display and work perfectly in Safari. Even then, it is usually only a line or two of code that needs to be changed to support the third most popular browser in the world.

Problems like these are less common today than they were even a year ago, but people still don’t see browsers for what they are, or at least what they should be: different windows into the same Internet. The problem is all too frequent. Macs constitute almost 10% of the web-viewing public now, and I suspect an even larger percentage of the whole market. It has been proven that Mac users are much more likely to pay for good software than Windows users.

Tux the Penguin, lovable mascot to the Linux community.

When a well-developed application comes out for the Mac platform, it is not only purchased by enough consumers to justify any extra cost associated with development (which, as I mentioned, is usually small or nonexistent), it is also embraced by the entire community. Developers like Wolfire can testify to the fact that the Mac and Linux communities are much tighter than Windows users. As a result, news travels quicker, publicity is easier to obtain, and you will find even your Windows numbers going up as a result of supporting OS X and Linux.

What it all boils down to is simple. People misunderstand what is involved in supporting multiple platforms. Doing so from the beginning is a lot easier than converting after the fact. In fact, in most cases, it won’t take any effort. And as a result of that minimal to no effort, developers will find a huge amount of new users that they couldn’t possibly have acquired if their software wasn’t cross-platform. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that’s worth it or not, but I hope you’ll come to the conclusion that, at least to me, is quite obvious.

I’ve been spending time writing a new blog series I intend to release, which will cover the basics of web design from the ground up. Unfortunately, this series is a big undertaking, much larger than I realized at the beginning. As a result you haven’t seen any published blogs for quite a while now, which I regret. I’m going to do my best to keep at least a post per week pace on this blog from now on, and I hope you will continue to read my posts as they come out. Thanks again for reading, and as usual please feel free to share your thoughts on the article in the comments section!

Spam.

Spam ruins everything, doesn’t it? These days, many spammers employ robots that crawl the web, going from site to site looking for email addresses to put on their list. These spambots are so prevalent now that putting your email address on the web for all to see is like sending an email to all the spammers that says “please send me all your offers!” But what are we supposed to do? Here are a few solutions that will allow people to email you with a greatly decreased risk of being placed on everyone and their brother’s spam list.

Alternative Ways to Give Out Your Email Online

Instead of having your email address listed in plain text, or as a link, directly on the page, here are three alternatives you can consider. Each of them has its downside, but hopefully at least one of these will work for your situation.

Web Form

A screenshot of the web form found on my contact page.

The ideal solution, in my opinion, is to set up a web form on your website. I’m sure you’ve seen these, if not check out my contact page. People fill out the form on your website, and you receive an email. If you email them back, they can use their email client to “reply” to you as normal. These web forms are usually coded with PHP, or another server side language. Because the email is stored on the server and never shown to the end user, these are extremely difficult for spam bots to exploit.

There are 2 downsides here. First is that it takes a lot longer to set up than a simple email link, but by the same token it’s not a difficult script to set up. Of course it depends who is doing your website, but it takes me about 1-2 hours to set up. The other downside is that you have to dedicate a whole page, or portion of a page, to the web form. Sometimes it’s nice to mention your email address offhand somewhere and let people know they can email you. I usually solve this dilemma by simply putting a link to the contact page instead of my email address. People are less likely to fill out the form if it has a lot of fields, so try to keep it simple.

Image Address

My email address as an image.

Another option is to use an image instead of text to display your email address. This, too, is demonstarted on my contact page. If you feel obligated to provide an email address in case people need to attach images and other files, or just in case they don’t feel totally comfortable with the web form, this is a good way to do it. You can also use it in your main content without dedicating an entire page to it. Most spam bots won’t be able to extract your email address from an image.

Unfortunately, there are some advanced bots out there that can read text in images. Maybe you’ve noticed captchas on a web forms, which ask you to enter a string of randomly generated characters and/or words. These words are usually distorted somewhat, sometimes so badly that they are hardly readable even by humans. This is to prevent robots from filling out these forms, and the distortion is because sometimes they can even read those images! However, if you need to get your actual email address to your audience, and a form just doesn’t cut it, this is perhaps the safest method. Using an image instead of plain text decreases your visibility to the spam bots many times over.

Remove the @ and the .

I wouldn’t suggest using this on your own site, since an image is a better solution. However, if you are working with a profile on some website that doesn’t allow you to use images, or are in a time constraint and need to get up and ready extremely quickly, this may be your only option. All this entails is replacing the @ and . with spelled out words. Here’s an example: john.doe [at] somewebsite [dot] com. Your visitors will catch the drift, but the spam bots usually won’t think it’s an email address. I’ve seen the [at] [dot] format used a lot though, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before the spam bots start recognizing that format as an email address, if it hasn’t happened already. Your best bet is to come up with your own creative way of punctuating it.

I hope that one of these methods is helpful to your situation. I’m not a security expert, this information is based on personal experience being spammed A LOT, and related articles that I have read through my years of being a web designer. If it is all-important that your email be secure from spammers, I suggest hiring a professional to advise you. However, this article is geared more at people who are considering or have already placed their email address right in the text of their website. Any of these three ideas is significantly less likely to get your email address put on a bunch of spam lists.

Let me know in the comments if you have a situation that none of these methods will work for; I’ll try my best to give you another viable alternative. Also comment if you have employed any other methods of letting people contact you via email whilst hiding the address from spam bots. And don’t forget to check back often or subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for reading!

Additionally, as a designer, I have to admire the amazing things that Obama has done with his campaign. It is difficult to communicate all that they have done in such a short space. Suffice to say that the effective use of technology and 21st century tools shows remarkable design and vision.

So from Why Wait Webs, I offer a heartfelt congratulations on running the best campaign in history, and on overcoming tremendous odds to become the first person of African descent to assume the office of President of the United States of America!

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)!