Flash or CSS?

[TechieTony]

Afternoon All,

Ive been tasked with revamping my company website. The problem is that im having a hard time choosing between basing my site off Flash or CSS... or both...

I know CSS is good for swift changes, navigation, and compatibility. Flash... cause it looks awesome.

Ive been told that the boss whats a flash based site but if it takes 5min to load then ill pass....

Any thoughts
Antony

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

CSS is good for swift changes, navigation, and compatibility. Flash... cause it looks awesome.

You can have awesome looking CSS sites, and bad looking flash sites... My take is, if you don't need Flash to achieve the specific look you need, don't use it. Why muddy the waters?

Dan



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[TechieTony]

Thats my though also... seems to me that flash is very code heavy and ive seen some pretty well put together CSS sites

 

[EdwardMartinIII]

Yep, Flash is an application. If your visitors don't have Flash turned on, all they get is a blank hole.

Unless you provide a handy link that reads "skip all this Flash."

In which case, why bother spending money on coding a Flash site if it's skippable?

But really, if your boss wants a Flash site, build a Flash site. If your boss wants the ugliest site on the planet, with black backgrounds and dark red letters and hdden text, you can -- at best -- advise him against it, but if it's your job to build whatever site your boss says, then that's your job.

Here's another piece -- let's say you are attacked by Christians and they rip all the flesh from your bones with oyster shells (hey, there's historical precendence!). At that point, your boss has to find someone who can find your Flash development files and figure 'em out fast enough to change the company Who Are We page to stop all those public speaking request for you.

HTML is mucho easier to change than a Flash application.

The contents of an HTML page are indexible by search engines -- Flash sites ain't.



Edward

"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door

 

[TechieTony]

Yea i was reading about that actually, had no idea swf and flv arent searchable by the crawlers..... horrible.

He comes in this morning and tells me that he wants to migrate to vista, a flash site, and office 07, this guy is settings me up for complete failure... complete epic failure.

 

[Foamcow]

SWF files are crawlable, at least by Google. However, there is no indication of what particular content is.
For instance, Google doesn't know what's a heading, what's a link, what's just plain text. So to all intents and purposes the site is less than optimised.

There are also accessiblity issues to consider. Flash has some great accessibility features built in now but it's down to the developer to know how to use them. Many don't.

Basically I've yet to see a valid use for a 100% Flash site that wasn't to do with online entertainment, movies or perhaps art. If your business falls outside these somewhat niche areas then you are probably building an HTML & CSS based site with some Javascript for enhanced interactivity in the UI.

There's no reason you can't add some bits of Flash in there too, just make sure that the Flash content isn't "mission critical" or be prepared for all the negatives outlined in this thread.

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[vacunita]

I wold strongly advice against overuse of flash. A small animation is o.k. But building an entire site out of flash can be to say the least very annoying for the user.

It can be very cumbersome when your internet connection is somewhat slow, to have to wait 20 minutes for a menu to load.

CSS can produce a site that is just as nice as a flash one would be, and would take about 10 times less time to load.

As has been said Maintenance can be a pain on a Flash site, since you'd have to recreate the site for every little change.

Also in this day and age of mobile browsing, cell phone and hand held browsers don't support flash so you'd be leaving out a growing section of the browsing population.

Basically there are so many more reasons not to use flash then there are reasons to use it.

But if your boss wants a flash site, well there's not much you can do.


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[EdwardMartinIII]

There are also accessiblity issues to consider. Flash has some great accessibility features built in now but it's down to the developer to know how to use them. Many don't."

Ugh. One of my less-than-glamorous jobs was going through an entire product website. the developer did it all in Flash and then they eventually quit and the development files were lost. This was awkward.

The client, however, had to achieve a certain level of usability a couple years later, because they had a customer who needed the site to conform to ADA standards.

So, the site was converted to a text version. Without the Flash development files (wasn't me -- wasn't me!), I had to go through the site and transcribe everything (because the Flash was locked against selecting text). Everything. By hand.

So I wouldn't make any mission critical part of a website using Flash, and if I had to use Flash, I'd almost certainly use it on a silent animation, in which case I'd proably just make an animated GIF, which runs on practically any browser regardless of plug-in status.

So, I'm deeply prejudiced against Flash. 8)

That said, I've just bought the latest version and will probably learn it, because I have clients that demand it. So, I will treat learning Flash as the same sort of skill as taking a cat's temperature -- for those times it's got to be done, at least try to minimize the collateral damage.

Edward

"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door

 

[Foamcow]

Most non-web folks don't realise that most of what they would want in a Flash site can be achieved using Javascript. LIkewise many web folks think that the only way to realise these things is with Flash.

It's also often easier, especially if you use a framework such as jQuery or Prototype/Scriptaculous.

You can do some really amazing high level stuff with Flash but most jobs don't even begin to approach those levels with their requirements. Those that do more often than not will require a specialist Flash developer.

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