Flash Web Design

Highly Interactive, flash gives a great user experience, it allows you to embed video, music clips, animation, and a host of other fun features that will keep your visitors entertained for hours.

Cross Browser compatible, because flash is a self contained program it does not suffer from cross browser issues like that of HTML & CSS. So what that means is that your website will look the same on all browsers & you need not worry about it displaying incorrectly on other browsers.

Huge Graphic Appeal, a hi-res version of your website can be run through flash, creating a great visual feast of information on your website, setting it apart from the competition.

Secure, all the info is embedded into the flash file & the "source code" is protected

Flash Games allow your website visitors to play fun & interactive games for hours. By tying the games into a database you wil be able to track things like high scores. It can become a powerful marketing exercise that allows you to build a user database.

Search Engine Optimisation is a big problem with any flash website. It is far more difficult to optimise a flash website as opposed to an HTML website. If you are wanting to rely on "organic" search results to bring visitors to your website then we would not suggest a flash website. If you opt for a flash website you need to have other marketing strategies in place to drive people to your website, i.e. Facebook Page, offline promotions & marketing.

Load Time, you have got roughly 20 seconds to grab a visitor's attention when they visit your website. If they are looking at a loading screen for that whole time, you have most likely lost them. The load time of a flash website is something you need to carefully consider when implementing a website strategy, most especially in a South African context where bandwidth is still an issue. Flash can be bandwidth heavy & as a result you may loose a large majority of visitors. Having a HTML version of your flash site can help, however that does add to the cost of development.

Flash Plugin, in order to display flash websites, people need to install flash players onto their machines on each one of their browsers. You also need to keep your flash player up to date & that means downloading the latest versions in order for newer flash sites to work. This might discourage some people from viewing your website, which means you will need to have HTML versions of your website as a backup, which means extra costs. Within the South African context we still have a lot of people accessing the internet from Internet Cafes and their offices. These places might not allow flash plugins to be installed as a result of network restrictions.

Changes, making structural changes to the flash website can be tedious. The main reason is that flash is timeline based, & changes to the numerous timelines can have far reaching costs. So this means that updates & edits to the website are time consuming, & as a result, expensive.

Expensive, because you are dealing with a number of animation elements that rely on a number of human interactions & scenarios that need to play out. This all adds to development time. Flash websites can be three to four times more expensive than traditional HTML websites. So it is important to look at your options to see what can be done through combining flash elements & HTML structure.