I made a small flash animation and am trying to decide wheither to put it on my site or not. Anyone know some pros and cons of putting flash on your site. I tested it and it ads 6 seconds to the 20 second page load time and it seems to me that most people will have to download some kind of program to view it. Any input would be appreciated. Thank You
Ya, blogmaster is right. Speed is important to be successful. But in term of program to view it, I dont think so.. what i thought was that people are already have flash plugin in their PC so viewing your flash won't be much of a problem.. unless you use Flash 8 where most users may have to download additional plugin.
Someone posted research claiming every addition of 10 seconds to load time lost you 50% of your audience so that a page that took say 20 seconds to load would loose 75 percent of people who clicked on link to site to begin with. I have not tested this myself but know I won't wait for 20 seconds for a page to load.
Pro's: looks good Con's: slows page loading, hurts page optimization I think alittle real light flash can be tasteful sometimes, but I'll probably never use it.
i agree with this one..btw is it a short animation presentation about your website? if you dont want to take it out just put link to your "view flash presentation"...hopefully this helps..
It isn't a presentation. It is a animation of some water rippling and moving. I found everyones comments to be helpfull. However I solved the problem by taking 3 screenshots of the flash and making a small gif. Looks just about as good as the flash did and it is only 30k verses the 90k of flash. The load time of the page now is 13 seconds on a 56k modem. If I make the gif out of just two screenshots than it shrinks it to 20k and a 11 second download time (56k modem). If I remember corectly the download time was close to 26 seconds with a 56 k modem with the flash. So if Smyrl is right than I would have lost 75% or more of the people with dial up.
If the flash, now gif, was on one of your two signature sites they both loaded super quick for me. I'm on cable. I do believe in fash as it really brings some life to ones site. But as Smryl said, load time is cruitial. On our hotel site we used to have a big intro flash page where you could skip the intro and got the home page. Some folks liked it others just wanted to get to the home page. I shelved it, then put a small flash on the home page. Next I'll make a link on the home page to a large popup flash that will really show off the property. This will be soemthing that for those that want it can go for it. Thats my opion on flash.
Flash isn't SEO compatible, which is a big disadvantage. It can also take a bit to load, especially for the increasingly few people using 56K. It can look much better then normal text/images though, so keep the file size small and Flash is useful.
X2, I've never really enjoyed flash on any webiste. Done right, it could look nice. Alot of times it's done messy and takes alot longer to load causing the user to exit the page
Flash can do magic for a website. One suggestion I'd have is to use flash where it's not important. An example can be found at pspatlas.com. At the top right you'll see a small flash with links to several pages throughout the site, but were it to not load the site would look fine with the white space. Optimization should be mindful as suggested, and can be easily accomdated for. If you're sites taking too long, try cutting corners elsewhere. This sacrifice I've found to be most of the time worth it. Flash has a handful of negatives, such as the loading time and potentially not working at all, but the bonus' outweigh them in my eyes. You can animate your site no with nothing else using flash.
If a gif is smaller than flash something is wrong. Why is there no link or attachment. Or I just missed it?
Pros : Simple ,Browser Independent, widely used for sites intro Cons : Boats can't crawls , Increase loading times handy flash usage. First, if using Flash for homepage, keep the option of ‘Skip Intro’ to keep the visitor from running away. Second, if you need an all Flash website, make sure to create an alternative site in HTML for web crawlers too Read more mohil.typepad.com/blog/2012/06/flash-website-pros-and-cons-of-flash.html