Showroom Advantage - Pros and Cons of Flash

Pros

Well designed Flash presentations can provide eye catching animation, and in the hands of a talented Flash artist, can set a mood or make a marketing point in dramatic fashion.

When should Flash be used?

• Banner ads for your product on someone else's web site
• Internet games
• Internal corporate applications where it is guaranteed that all users have high speed connections.
• Top end corporate web sites that promote a brand, rather than selling an individual unit of merchandise.

Cons

• A Flash element on a web page draws attention to itself. On an eCommerce site, you want the visitor to instead quickly move to browsing through your product offering. Since a Flash element can not and should not comprise your product offering (the vehicles in your inventory), it is out of place on an auto dealer web site.
• Flash elements are large files that must be downloaded by your customer's browser. Thirty-six percent of your customers still do not have broadband internet access. I'll leave it up to you - Do you think its a good idea to make loading your home page a time consuming and frustrating experience for more than one third of your potential customers?!?
• Many internet users, especially middle aged users, are irritated by extraneous animation on web sites. As a result, a fair number of them actually turn off the ability of their browser to display Flash elements. If a Flash element happens in any way to be integral to the operation of your web site, then your web site is unusable by these potential customers. Any important message contained is completely lost.
• Flash elements are more costly to produce than standard graphic and HTML elements. This is why many web development companies love to use them. They get a higher billing rate for Flash production, and it stretches out their billable hours. Since Flash elements actually damage the effectiveness of an eCommerce web site, a web developer's insistence on heavy use of Flash elements is an unconscionable conflict of interest.

You don't have to take my word for this. Just visit the largest and most successful eCommerce web sites, such as Amazon.com, BestBuy.com, Buy.com, CircuitCity.com, OfficeDepot.com, or BarnesAndNoble.com.

Of those six industry leading eCommerce web sites, you'll find exactly two flash elements among all six home pages, and those two elements are very subdued.

Flash technology reminds me of a point made in the movie Jurassic Park, which poses the thought (para-phrased): "Some people spend so much time discovering if they can do something, they forget to question whether or not they should do it."