Is Flash still relevant?

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)...