Flah

[DavidS]

I've been contemplating using a flash entrance and option for my website. How many photographers use flash or any form of advanced website presentation for their sites? Does anyone know how having a flash entrance will effect spiderbots?

[medform-norm]

I've been contemplating using a flash entrance and option for my website. How many photographers use flash or any form of advanced website presentation for their sites? Does anyone know how having a flash entrance will effect spiderbots?

Oh please, no Flash! I'm very allergic to websites with Flash - they slow things down and nowadays, the impatient webber will kill anything that takes too long to load. There must be other solutions to what you want to do, no?

[Dave Parker]

Inked,

I know that flash seems appealing, but we have found out in our web business, which we are now hosting over 500 websites, that the ones we designed with flash are the least visited websites, their traffic numbers run about 35% less than any other website we have designed or host, the problem seems to be the loading times and the various versions of flash floating around, flash is a media type that was actually designed to run off of CD then ported to the web and unfortunately over 50% of the current internet users are still on some type of dial up account, which does not handle the big downloads very easy, in addition if they have to update a version of flash, then you have added to their download times, spiders do not normally index flash sites.

Just my observations from the various companies we have designed websites for.

Dave Parker

[David A. Goldfarb]

If I see Flash loading, I usually click out.

[jjstafford]

I use a lot of flash, but _only_ for illustrations that require it. Generally, it's just a pain on an opening page. While Macromedia (now Adobe, Inc.) will tell you that Flash is the most common plug-in in the world, and some huge number of people have it, it does not mean they LIKE it.

You can do a lot with javascript that might be easier with Flash; my humble opinion: spend the effort to script rather than Flash, and keep it simple.

[David A. Goldfarb]

Even Javascript is unnecessary more often than not and just makes things crashy.

[Bob Carnie]

I use mainly explorer on my computer , as well I have safari, when I go to a website with flash on explorer for some reason I lock up on the front page, if I really want to see the site I will switch to safari and it will work.
9 times out of 10 I will just forget the site and move one and I would imagine this happens frequently.

[Dave Parker]

My wife and I have developed the idea in designing websites that easier the better, if you make it difficult at all for your visitors to enter or view your website, then the possibility is that they will go else where to gather their information, on the internet, the KISS princeable seems to work the best..

Dave

[jjstafford]

Even Javascript is unnecessary more often than not and just makes things crashy.

Your comment is important, David, so forgive if I pry a bit. I've never experienced a crash with Javascript on my WindoZe XP/Pro nor the Mac G5 under OSX, and the largest single constituency I work for (a university with over 7,000 PCs and perhaps 250 Macs) has no problem with my javascript. However, an outside client (a magazine) which uses Macintoshes, mostly V9 and OSX does experience stopped clients. The magazine has a rather, ah, 'creative' systems person and they experience far more problems than just web browser crashes. But it raises the question I cannot anticipate: how many other Mac people are similarly creative/mismanaged, odd, or is it truly a problem even on well managed Macs (other than the university Macs which do not have problems.)

Now Java is a different case and I just will not use it.

[Dave Parker]

Not David, but will put some information forth here about the windows side of this, XP does in fact handle java script quite a bit better than the previous versions(I still am on 98 with this machine) one of the problems with Javascript in the past was it would seize memory for its calls, and of course the older versions of windows, the memory management was poor to say the least, I don't have alot of experiance with Mac's but I know the one that I do have seems to have memory management problems simular to the Windows machine I am currently on..

Dave