Macromedia say Flash is "the solution for producing and delivering high-impact websites." It's also a means for making your site highly annoying and downright unusable. Here's why:

» Gratuitous Animation

Flash has contributed to the amount of gratuitous animation on the Web, and unlike animated GIF's, Flash animations do not respond to your browser's Stop button or your keyboard's Esc key, so they cannot be easily turned off. Users must resort to either covering the offending animation with their hand, or, more likely, leave the site altogether.

» Splash Screen Renaissance

By sporting significantly smaller file sizes than equivalent GIF animations, Flash has brought back the splash screen, one of the most irritating of all web "experiences." Web users typically are looking for content, and presenting them with a content-free splash screen is a sure way to annoy, and give visitors a (good) reason to leave the site.

» Flash Sites

Incorporating Flash into an HTML page or splash screen is bad, but entire sites built with Flash are positively evil because they make the Web much less usable. Flash sites render useless the browser's Back button and address bar, and make book marking pages inside a Flash site impossible. Printing Flash pages from your browser doesn't work, nor does intra-page keyword searching. Finally, Flash sites eliminate HTML links' visited and unvisited colours, and that color-changing feature is the Web's single most important navigational cue.

» Flash and search engines

Pure flash pages, or pages heavily loaded with flash suffer from the same ranking problems as frame sites. There is simply not enough content for spiders to determine relevancy of the site, hence there is invariably no meaningful ranking achieved.

» Domain name selection and registration

Choosing the right Domain name is imperative in the success of your site. We can search for your first choice of domain name and purchase it on your behalf. We can handle all aspects of registration and if we are unable to get an exact match, we will approach you with some alternatives.

A flash site usually consists of one HTML page (the home page) and all other content is in a flash object.

A flash designers argument, when questioned about the subject, is that the index page is in HTML which can be read by search engines. Adding some content, meta tags and a descriptive title will do the trick. So far I have only had one potential client who was stupid or naive enough to believe he can achieve good rankings in a very competitive field (real estate in Spain), following this argument.

Again the vast majority of search engines have problems following the links in flash objects.