Flash is a powerful web technology that achieves a high level of visual impact from the graphical point of view. Unfortunately, it is widely misused in web design. There are currently still many problems with Flash, especially related to usability and search engine behaviour; we need to thoroughly understand what those problems are before we decide to use Flash for our site.

As with any business decision, it all boils down to understanding what our target audience wants. If you want to make a big impression from a graphical point of view, Flash is definitely a good approach. 

Flash technology can actually be helpful:

• Creating a certain feel and look that may influence your audience
• When you need to show a presentation, for example a demo of your product.
• To develop interactive games, like those found on sites for kids like Sesame Street, Nickelodeum, or Yahoo! Games. 
• When you want to dress up a minimalist site. In this case, a small Flash animation or banner embedded in an HTML document will not consume excessive bandwidth, will load fast, and will enhance the appearance of a bare-bones site.

However, concrete evidence still points to the fact that most web users utilize the web to find information, and what they regard most important is:

a) quality of content

b) ease of navigation, and

c) speed.

Users also consider the web a highly interactive medium: they are unlikely to watch a computer screen for long periods of time without giving some sort of input.

Current issues with Full Flash designs:

Bandwidth and Load Time Constrains: Sites designed with Flash take a long time for dial-up connections to download. Current statistics estimate over 68%  of all users have a broadband connection.

Usability Constrains:  Users have no control over the text size they want to use.

Search Engine Constrains: Although large search engines like Google, yahoo, etc. now have some Flash indexing capabilities, these are still very limited. You will definitely have a hard time achieving high rankings with a Flash site. One option around this problem is to design a second, search-engine-friendly HTML version of your site.

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