[Jacob Haug]

Well I recently wrote a flash article to test out the new article system on Webforumz. Anyway I thought I would pass on the goodness.

This article is covering The pros and cons of flash development. What are they? Should you use flash on your website?

Well read this article and decide for yourself.
http://www.thewebsqueeze.com/articles/pros...velopment-1.htm

Let me know if you guys have any suggestions, or comments.

This post has been edited by Jacob Haug: 22 February 2008 - 01:45 PM

[James Mitchell]

Its a good read, very fun and informative. I think you hit some major negatives there right on the head. Good job.

I did notice (1) typo: Now for the bad news! [you forgot the s]

[sypher]

"Macromedia is working on making Flash more accessible, but it is taking a long time."
Should be Adobe?

Another thing to add is about making flash appelts for websites.

[Jacob Haug]

Ahhh, thanks guys. I made the changes I for some reason call Adobe, Macromedia. Anyway, hope you enjoyed.

[DiMonay]

A very good article, defined pretty much all the good and bads of Flash.

SEO is something that I've had trouble doing in Flash, anyone have any tips on improving pageranks and what not? (besides an xhtml version of the site, which is, like stated in the article, way too much work)

[sypher]

Well pagerank is purely gained from incoming links (the higher the PR rank of the incoming link the more rank you gain)

[Jacob Haug]

Also, since I wrote that article things have changed. You can do query string variables in flash now, which fixes most of the cons. This allows people to bookmark your pages, and search engines to index each page of your website. Also, if the content is placed with in flash correctly formatted then search engines should have no problem indexing the content.

[temhawk]

Page could not be found

I'd be interested in reading your article!

[graham08]

Any chance of getting the article back up at all? I know several people who are interested in using flash as part of the header portion of the site with navigation. Does that sound like a good idea, particularly if the website is multimedia focused? Would love to have a read of the article if it comes back online

[Karl Buckland]

You'd have to talk to the people over at webforumz.com. The website is currently down, but may be back soon?

[Jacob Haug]

Here it is!

http://www.thewebsqueeze.com/articles/pros...velopment-1.htm

This post has been edited by Jacob Haug: 22 February 2008 - 01:45 PM

[temhawk]

Many thanks!

[graham08]

At the bottom line of this whole debate of whether flash should be used, it boils down to a couple of things really. I wouldn't make a website entirely out of flash unless it was being used for promotional reasons for a short period of time. I've found from previous experience that flash is best implemented into small chunks of the website, such as the header (not navigation), presenting something on a site or occasionally it can be used for something functional. But the most important thing to remember is that you have to be subtle with your use of flash.

[haku]

I quite like flash, and I think the above is a pretty good assessment of when and how it should be used.

One thing I'm thinking, is that maybe you could make flash navigation, but have HTML code in the <noscript> tags that displays an HTML based navigation bar. Has anybody ever done that? Can it be done the way I'm thinking?

[graham08]

Off the top of my head I don't think that would be possible in theory, yet on the other hand I'm not entirely sure what the <noscript> tag actually does. I've always steered clear of flash navigation (even after i tried implementing it again recently), but if it is possible to get the available text display for search engines etc and also have sweet looking flash then that would be good.

Another bit of flash work I'm considering is what I'm calling 'borderline flash', essentially you make flash documents surrounding the center part of a page which can contain text image written in html or php for example. That was you can use fancy looking flash to supplement a page and keep navigation and content friendly for search engines and the visitors really.

[haku]

It turns out that I was correct. I decided to throw together a little page, and I threw in some html in the noscript tags, and it worked!

Here's a link: http://jaypan.com/fl...test/index.html

You will have to toggle javascript on and off to see the difference (reloading the page in between). But I put together a rollover image for when javascript is turned off, and some flash for when javascript is turned on.

I think that this means that an HTML/CSS menu bar could be included in the noscript tag when using flash navigation, and this will both be good for SEO as well as work when someone has javascript turned off.

edit: Theoretically this means that someone could design an entire site in flash and just have an SEO friendly HTML/CSS site underneath. It would be expensive (basically two sites have to be created for one), but I think it would work.

This post has been edited by haku: 27 February 2008 - 10:30 AM

[haku]

I'm probably the only one who really cares, but after writing up that code last night, I realized that it still wasn't the best way of solving this issue of flash and html. So I went back and re-did the code:

http://jaypan.com/flash_test/

This method ended up being a lot better, because the javascript is now all fully external and unobtrusive, but the effect is the same. Also, the way I did it last night wasn't so great because with the script blocker I use (noscript firefox plugin) it added this icon that got in the way.

What I did was set up the div with the correct xhtml/css encoding. Then I loaded the flash using SWFObject (free on the net) using a window.onload in the bottom of the SWFObject file. This way, if javascript is turned off the flash doesn't load, and the HTML is still there, but if javascript is enabled, the flash is loaded in place of the HTML.

This was less code, more effective, and better separation of content and function.

[marcamos]

Very nice haku, very very nice.

[haku]

Thanks!

[graham08]

If it works like you say it does then thats very nice indded mate, would take me quite a while to work that out On reflection of using borderline flash, I'm not going to use it in one particular instance that I'm working on now. Instead I'm just going to go nuts and put some beautiful presentation and animation into the flash. But of course thats not to say that borderline flash won't come in handy in other places.