Flash is very much needed to avoid hacking code. Its also not advisable to use flash for entire site may be header or banner will be good.
Flash is exciting! Flash has it's place - some websites should not be created using flash, but others (music sites) are perfect.
Flash and SEO go nicely together, there is absolutely no problem with 100% flash websites being indexed. Apple has simply made a big mistake with not supporting flash and they will eventually turn around and support flash and else many third party tools will step in to do this for them. So flash is a useful thing, and there to stay. However Flash is complex, and to be honest very illogical the way it works, and if i may suggest I would not invest many months to learn Flash as i feel that it's simply a bad investment to do this. It's better to outsource complex flash jobs to somebody with excellent flash skills and focus on CSS/Jquerry maybe some PHP.
and the person to whom you will outsource the flash work could be "confusedone" so let him learn the flash
It depends on what you wanna do. I don't like flash personally. But I come from the world of audio and video post production. I prefer to animate in a software called Anime Studio or Toonboom Animate ( which is what is used to make Spongebob Squarepants) So if I need 2d animation other than After Effects I will use one of those. I don't have a reason to program or use the flash software. So for me personally...Flash isn't needed for any of the workflows or project I get.
but there are thousands of webdesign agencies who work only and only in flash. i have been working with one of these companies couple of years ago and they had plenty of work. so it all depends on for which industry you work and whats your expertise.
Hi sorry for the late reply! Thanks for all people's opinions and all are vauled. I went onto my course with quite a negative outlook on flash - mainly from hanging around in affiliate marketing before i actually knew what flash was. Saying this, i still am pretty negative about learning it all. I asked my lecturer the other day how flash is actually 'practically' used, and his response was " for games". Probably the right one, but not the one i wanted (wishing to learn sites etc). However i shall plod on on through the course and learn to make games and stuff, but im hoping that if i can make games, then i sure as hell can make sites with flash and it does seem a prominent factor in this area - look at jobsites for web designers and flash is mentioned a lot, look around magazines and flash is still there etc. Trying to keep blind faith, even with html5 around the corner....
All fascinating website to me is flash player. I absolutely luv it because it is more attracting and more fun. Moving picture always make me feel good.
I hate Flash personally as it is useless in terms of SEO and can cause very slow loading, thing is though it has great visual impact. If done right with a small bit of Flash you can really transform a plain boring site into something with great cisual impact, now if the designer has done his job right it will contain all the needed content in the page, with good layout and design without Flash (Not everybody actually uses flash or wants to install it). But then for those who do have it installed you can have a small section with great visuall impact really showing off your product, I think the key is to keep it a reasonable size and avoid putting any real content in there, use it as a flashy little advert style section of the page. If its small load times wont be effected to bad and if the content is in the normal HTML part of the site and not hidden in flash then search engine are getting what they need too.