Macromedia Flash has grown in leaps and bounds in the past few
years. Being an easily accessible tool with big market
penetration (above 90%) it has brought vector animation and
sound truly alive on the web, while still being able to serve
low bandwidth access with multimedia. There was a big boom
around 2000 and almost any website had some flash intros and
multimedia heavy flash artillery. The problem was and is still
uneducated designers...
The trends
We have seen a decline in corporate companies using flash only
websites. The current trend is to be more content driven. The
reasoning behind this is the obvious searchability of html based
content, whether static or dynamic. Then there was the long
download time of sometimes mistakenly guised 'broadband sites',
which was in fact losing companies new customers.
Current Solutions
Macromedia is working hard on making flash searchable and have
recently added 'Flash metadata' to their movies, so that users
can add a title and description to their flash movies to
describe the content therein. Quality Flash developers know how
to structure their content for fast download times (except if
they are aiming for a broadband market) and companies should be
aware of this. Don't ever have a Flash website designed just for
the sake of having animation and sound. Yes, it makes a huge
impact if implemented correctly, but your design studio should
know what medium will best suit your target audience. Query them
on this and brainstorm to find your best solution vs. price. A
hybrid solution works best these days, implementing the best of
both worlds and serving Flash within HTML content, seamlessly
integrated.
The latest version of Flash (version 8) makes it a very good
candidate for complete offline CD and DVD presentation
solutions. Improved video support and great new real time
effects (drop shadows, blurring etc) make it a pleasure to use.
The actionScripting ability has also grown tremendously and we
are eagerly anticipating actionScript 3 which will be launched
next year (2006). The development potential will be even more
amazing, providing robust infrastructure for building even
better full web based applications and flash games.
Is flash still relevant?
Yes, we would definitely say so, but be sure to brief your web
design company properly, listing your goals for the site. These
can be broken into necessities and 'nice-to-haves'. Know the
difference or enquire more about it. Applied correctly, Flash
will enhance the user experience, engaging more of the user's
senses and enriching their experience on your website. Don't
bombard them, just KISS (keep it simple stupid)...
About the author:
Dirk Tolken heads up
PERONii Solutions, a
