To Flash or not to Flash
I was doing some surfing today, and I realized that Flash - which is a great tool - is often more annoying than it is useful. The reason for that is simple - the developers that utilize it tend to be one trick ponies. Many of them are masters of the tween and the art of action scripting, but couldn’t do a simple ajax affect if their lives depended on it.
To best utilize Flash, you need to understand that it is just another tool in what should be a comprehensive toolbox. If you really want to serve your clients and users interests, you should build everything simply and economically. Use Flash where you need to use it, but don’t force it to accomplish every little task.
The end result of over-Flashifying a site is that you end up with something that is incredibly difficult to maintain over time - thus driving up production time and costs. It becomes even more complicated once the original designer has handed off the Flash piece to someone else. There’s nothing as frustrating as trying to fix a Flash file that was build incorrectly in the first place.
One thing that I find frustrating is the overused Flash intro. It’s great to see a cool intro on my first visit to a site, but when I come back I should never have to sit through it again. It’s just a waste of my time. Since an intro - which I’m not a fan of anyway - is used to introduce your brand/product/message to the users, do you really want that brand/product/message to be irritating? The answer is a resounding no.
Flash works best as a user-initiated method within an established web 2.0, css framework, so let’s use it that way. To all the Flash designers out there that can’t cascade a stylesheet, it’s time to join learn.
