Flash is a technology developed by Macromedia for different functions, which allows the creation of vector animations and many applications over the Web. The use of Flash in a Website has advantages and disadvantages, which include:

Advantages:

- You can create animations of objects, texts, pictures and everything related to them;
- It can generate attractive pages and striking effects;
- You can add sounds or moving images in different parts of the film;

Disadvantages:

- In order to see the animations, the user must have on his PC the last Flash Plugin, and since he generally doesn't have it, he can´t see anything, or he only sees a blank screen or is being redirected to Macromedia site where he must download and install the Plugins, so the page is outdated. Even the absence of some Plugins forces the user to have to close all his browser windows, which is a very bad image for your site.

- Often texts or images within Flash can be seen in some browsers and not in other, so the user will only see a background image and no texts, or can see movements and buttons but with nothing to read. Thus your site loses significant number of visitors.

- The Flash pages are much heavier than normal, and take a long time to load, making the user get away from the site. Many designers put a preloader indicating that the film is loading, but a second wating is a whole life for the user, who will quickly leave the site. Besides, pages are slower.

- The same effects generated by Flash, can be achieved with other program languages, which have the same benefits but not the same defects, like Ajax, Javascript, etc.

- Generally if a site has flash, it offers an alternative HTML, but you have to build two different sites, and it rises your site budget and you don´t achieved an unified corporate image.

- The pages made with Flash are invisible to search engines. Google and other search engines detect text links and index them. When they stumbled onto a page with Flash, they do not detect anything and go away, and therefore a page Flash is not well positioned, unless you pay an alternative method of promotion, or use some other technic, that tends to be more expensive.

- Difficulty in generating dynamic pages for interaction with the user: it is almost impossible to achieve a full and interactive page entirely in Flash, with features such as forms, databases, surveys, etc. Flash make it nearly impossible to register users, create online stores, classifieds, websites, etc..

The list of disadvantages continues.

On these issues we put aside the use of Flash, and we recommend it is used only for some site headers. The customer will take into account these points and take a decision...