Flash

Flash is a program from Adobe that allows advanced animation, and user-interation without having to load new pages. At Dazines, we think Flash is a really useful tool, that helps make a site come to life.

Flash can really put the finishing touch to make your site really stand out. Just look at the portfolio in the top left corner of this website. This is an example of using a small amount of flash to add some movement and interest to your site.

Following are a few links to some examples of Flash we have done:

• Real Life Imaging - this photographers website is entirely in Flash, and offers a great medium for them to display their portfolio of images to prospective clients. Please excuse the long loading times, but it requires the loading of 70 high quality images.
• Magic Corn - we created a simple Flash game for this client, that wanted a small fun zone for kids on their website
• Fudini.net - these are some fun things we have done with flash. Just a little showcase site for our Flash talents

Limitations of Flash

Although Flash is an undoubtedly useful tool, at Dazines we are aware of its' limitations, and believe it should only rarely be used for a whole site.

It is useful for photographers to do their whole site in Flash (as per Real Life Imaging). The limitations for using flash for a whole site are:

• Slow download times - because Flash relies heavily graphics, it often long waiting times when people are viewing you web site.
• Poor discoverabiliy by search engines - because a lot of text in Flash is stored as an image, search engines don't pick this up, so the website doesn't then rank highly in Google.
• Longer development times - Flash generally requires much more code to create simple links and such like, so tends to have longer development times
• Poor scalability and flexibility - it is much harder to create a large website using Flash, and it is not easy to add extra sections or members areas as your website grows or the focus of you business develops and changes