I am designing a new site and am studying whether flash graphics is a good idea or not. I have a basic mindset against it, I don't like to wait while other sites download their flash, and I find that the more flash (which can be done by a designer that knows nothing about your product or industry) the less content. You can pay a designer to come up with fancy graphics, but it takes local resources to come up with relevant content. But I want to be successful so I am studying it. Here is what I did. Ominture has a system that lets you modify your site on the fly and see what the results are. This lets you optimize your web site to the max. I can't afford their system and my traffic is so low that meaningful statistics are tough to get. But they list some of their customers. So I went through their customer list for retail sites, all of which I am assuming are optimized and this is what I learned. Most don't have any kind of moving graphics. Walmart does, but it is updated continually to show and highlight current specials. A women's clothes fashion site uses the most, which makes sense, but an animated gif could cover a lot of what they do. Flash is good for a lot of stuff, don't get me wrong. But for a retail site it looks like thumbs down. enjoy wiz
Personally I am not a big fan of Flash. I think it is an amazing technology and if used in the right situation, it can be very beneficial. However, if you are trying to sell something to customers on Dialup (unfortunately there are still people out there that have no other choice), chances are they aren't going to wait for a bulky Flash file to load. I find it very aggrivating when I go to a website that uses a Flash design that is obviously not professionally created and has a repeating loop of some poor quality sound file with a broken pause or stop button. A good use of flash can be an animated image to draw attention to a particular product or advertisement. I am usually impressed when I see a good mix of .jpg, .gif, and Flash together. That's just my two cents!
On further investigation even the women's fashion site only had flash on the landing page. When you clicked into the retail site, not even an animated gif was found. And personally I don't think it is just for people with dialup. A quick survey around our company showed that people don't like to have moving images on the page when they are trying to understand something.
There are quite a lot of good flash sites around the web but the only catch there is they are not Search Engine friendly as far as i know. So if your site is more about content, i recommend not to have or just have minimal flash.. probably just some animations on the header or a banner but the content should still be html.