Advice for designing sites with Flash?

[kjohnson]

Flash is great, but I would only use it on an intro (with a skip button for the 56k users like me). And the plug-in issue: At school some of our computers (the ones that I use) have Firefox and it is hard to download the plug-in and install it at school so the navbar on our website can't be seen. I added a very small links table into the footer of each of our pages so that we could still access everything without opening up IE.

[Roland]

Originally Posted by AIBob

I personally do not like flash.... You can do all of the flash abilities using just HTML and javascript and images, if you would like me to, ill design an html alternative to a flash thing you may want to do...

Well if it comes down to Flash vs. some weird DHTML effect for an animation or something I would choose Flash any day, since it's got more cross-browser compatibility for that sort of thing than any JavaScript. It's also very useful for cross-platform video if you happen to have Flash Pro.

[HFWang]

I personally dislike flash because it has two properties.

1) Its binary
2) Its not built on an open standard

IMO the above two things directly contradict the foundations of the web as we know it (insert scary music as you will). Simply put the idea of the internet is to make it easier to publish and read information. Making it binary and closed source make it sort of difficult to do either of them (unless you have the right software).

Plus, Flash has its place in games... but I have huge problems with all-flash or even mostly Flash websites. Flash makes selecting text and bookmarking a pain. And almost as an added bonus, most webdesigners go crazy when they have that much power and I end up wondering where I am supposed to click on the flashing monkey or rub the goldfish in order to move around on their site.

[JohnBoucher]

Good web design practices have you designing for and testing with different browsers, plugins and connection speeds. If your pages break for any reason , your visitors will leave in a "flash".

You can build flash detection into your pages and redirect to a non-flash page for users that don't have or don't want the plugins. Yes, there are people that won't or can't enable plugins either because of security concerns, or slow connections.

Google flash page redirection for ideas.

[kjohnson]

Originally Posted by JohnBoucher

Good web design practices have you designing for and testing with different browsers, plugins and connection speeds. If your pages break for any reason , your visitors will leave in a "flash".

You can build flash detection into your pages and redirect to a non-flash page for users that don't have or don't want the plugins. Yes, there are people that won't or can't enable plugins either because of security concerns, or slow connections.

Google flash page redirection for ideas.

Team 1657 from Isreal has a Javascript popup that comes up as soon as you load their page that allows you to choose whether you would like to view their flash site or their HTML site.
http://hamosad.freeownhost.com/

[JohnBoucher]

Originally Posted by nukemknight

Team 1657 from Isreal has a Javascript popup that comes up as soon as you load their page that allows you to choose whether you would like to view their flash site or their HTML site.
http://hamosad.freeownhost.com/

The popup does exactly what you said it would do and the buttons do what they are supposed to. If I can make a suggestion, you could do the same thing with a plain html page with buttons. I would add some team graphics and/or color to the background. When the dialog box displays, I immediately thought I got an error message of some sort. When I read the dialog, I knew what to do, but it wasn't immediately apparent.

I like the progress that you are making with the interior content. Lots of good team pictures.

[cdawzrd]

The majority of humans (including me) run on 56k or less dial-up modems. Your flash site might run just fine when testing it at the lab or from your T1 line at school, but if I come across a flash site that doesnt offer an immediate alternative, I close the page! I haven't even gotten around to installing the latest version of the flash player on one of my computers.

I think that Flash is great for doing animations for fun or instruction (I've seen many flash tutorials, and Homestar Runner is great), but I can't stand it when people make a flash site, or a flash navigation bar on their website.

Face it: It might "look cool" to have your buttons appear in a flash of color and morph around when you click on them, but it is far cooler to me if everything appears instantly. That means, do your entire site in HTML. You can get quite nice visual effect using CSS and careful use of images (another hassle is enormous background images).

When you start designing a Flash-based website, keep in mind that to some of us, viewing your site will be either too difficult to be worth the effort, or downright impossible. Please, provide a non-Flash alternative.

Jonathan