So today when someone talks about wanting Flash in their website or they want us to Photoshop an image we always have to clarify exactly what they want as the final outcome. Originally Flash was made by a company called Macromedia. That same company also made Dreamweaver, the website development software that most of the worlds professional website designers used. Adobe was known for Photoshop but once they acquired Macromedia they became the leader in website development software. Today Flash, Dreamweaver and Photoshop are often sold as a package along with other website development software from Adobe.

In the beginning days of Flash usage on the Internet the one thing that stood out was that you could greatly reduce the file size of images by using Flash. This allowed us to develop some pretty impressive animations that would load reasonably fast back in ancient times (the 1990's) when we had 28.8 and 56k modems. Later people discovered that there was a problem with search engine optimization because Flash was using pictures, even the text in a Flash website was more like a picture of text than actual text. The search engines only understand text and can't see the pictures so this created a problem. We often designed websites in which we would use certain animated elements but we didn't like to make the entire website using animation due to the negative effect this would have on all search engines.

Today's Flash allows for actual text to be used so this problem has been resolved. Also, in the past many websites would have an entry page where the viewer could select HTML or FLASH versions of the website. Some websites had a "Skip Intro" option which most people would select. We have always prefered to use animation but not over do it to the point that people had something so long and boring that they'd skip it altogether. This is why we always advise clients that we don't like to use animation just to have it but we always felt that it needed to serve some purpose. For example if a client's business sells 5 products or offers 5 services, then with one animated banner at the top of the website we could show off those services or products without making someone sit through a mini movie. While the animation is going on the viewer can be reading text below that or click on any of the navigation buttons to go to a different page.

Having said all of that for the right type of website we are certainly not opposed to designing the entire thing using Flash. We also have the ability to use action scripting (programming code) which can connect our Flash based website to a database. In sum with Adobe Flash today we can do much more and make some very robust websites using Flash combined with ecommerce and have all the database driven website functions that we can have when using other methods.