Flash it a great medium for advertisements, banners, navigation and other specific areas of your site. If your entire site is in Flash then that to me could be a mistake. From a visitors standpoint Flash is awesome and hip and cool. [unless your on dial up] From a search engine standpoint Flash is worthless and can have negative effects.

If your entire site is flash or your entire navigation is flash please know that the SE's cannot read flash or even see flash. So if an SE comes to your site and it is all flash navigation they will not be able to find your other web pages. There is an easy way around this by adding a text navigation footer to the bottom of all your pages.

Additionally Flash splash pages are not very beneficial either. Yes there are many companies that do this; however, most of those companies can also afford to toss away thousands of dollars in other forms of advertising that isn't helpful to you the visitor/consumer. Companies like Pepsi and Coca-Cola can get away with using all Flash as they are multibillion dollar companies.

After all Coke commericals show Polar Bears and Penguins living together in harmony drinking their soda. The only problem is that those animals live on opposite sides of the planet.

We don't use much Flash in our designs/projects because we know that SE's cannot read it. Same with graphics. The search engines cannot see your pretty pictures. To them it is just a graphical placeholder. If you add ALT text to your images it will help the SE's but it still isn't as good as using regular HTML and CSS to do the same fancy things in the same amount of page real estate.

So if you are considering using Flash to power your whole website I hope that these notes may help you make an educated decision. Yeah it is cool to have a nice Flash website; however, having a website that is functional and profitable is cooler than any Flash site I have seen.

I do not specialize in Flash; however, I would be happy to offer my thoughts on how your site is currently using Flash and if there would be any way to improve the site and supplement your Flash. Please contact me if you would like to discuss "To Flash or Not To Flash?"

Phillip