What is Flash?

Flash is an animation tool that is used for website designing. Flash software is a product developed by Macromedia. This helps the website designers to animate the webpages thereby making the website very attractive. Flash even support other platforms as well for animations.

Why using flash?

As stated above, this is an animation software. This helps the website designer to make the site look attractive. Commonly used flash scripts on webpages are designing of menu buttons. Apart from that flash animations are normally used on the introductory page in order to create interest in the visitor's mind. Now a days it is also seen that website designers are also using flash animations on the product page in order to make it look attractive. Web designers feel that flash animations helps to make your website eye catchy and it makes the website very live. But there are some darker facts while using flash on your websites. Webdesigners are concerned with those disadvantages.

Some facts to be considered before incorporating flash on your website:

# Do you overuse flash onto your site? If you are making some kind of product presentation using flash through your site, then one thing must be kept in mind is that for the first time the visitor might like that presentation. But if they visit your site over and over again then they might get bored watching the same animation. This situation needs to be avoided by enabling cookies to redirect them to the non-animation page etc..

# Time factor is a big concern. These animation files are generally big in size and takes time to download. As of fact, a visitor on an average stays on a site for 15 seconds and so the visitor might swap to some other website even before the animations is properly downloaded. In order to avoid this, try to put "Loading" status while your flash animation is getting loaded and in the mean time put some interesting content which users can go through while the animation gets loaded.

# The theme of your website is also very important. E.g. if your website is just to provide some kind of legal informations, then the visitors to your site is concerned only with that portion of your site which he requires. So it is not necessary to waste his time but putting flash animations in order to grab his attention. On the other hand, if you have a greeting card company, then it requires flash animations so that the users can feel like going through your site.

# Budget constraints is also a decisive factor whether the web designer will be able to incorporate flash based animations to your site. Developing animations using flash is very time consuming. And so website designers take huge money for incorporating them to your website. So it is important to get an appropriate price quote for flash based website. If you have budget constraints then it is advisable o keep flash based animations as your option.

Overall using flash on your website really comes down to personal preference.

Conclusion:

Know about your website requirement properly in order to use flash animations.