I'm seriously thinking of building my first Flash site. The problem is that I have never designed anything in flash before, as a matter of fact, I have no idea how to work with it.On the other hand, lately I have noticed that the flash sites don't seem to be that trendy anymore.
Originally posted by Pedro Monteiro lately I have noticed that the flash sites don't seem to be that trendy anymore.
What is your perspective on this?
first point, DONT DO SOMETHING JUST BECAUSE ITS TRENDY! you have your own imagination.. use it
There is nothing worse then a bad flash site, good flash sites i can tolerate waiting the minute or two for the preloader, but bad flash sites just make me cringe.. and your first one, will most likely be a bad one.
As for flash becoming less trendy, check out linkdup and similar sites, and the number of flash based sites would probably out weigh html sites 50 to 1, but you check out a site like zeldman then the number of flash sites linked to compared to non flash sites would probably equally be 50 to 1, it depends what circle you follow as to wether there is a dominance of flash or not.
The reason that all-flash sites "aren't treny any more" is that people have realised that flash is a very bad tool for creating a whole site. It's good for animations and it's good for interactive games / tools which require user interfaces that can not be created using other technologies, but as a tool for creating whole web sites it is severely lacking (mainly on accessibility grounds). The thread linked to by Sketch above has some good arguments against using Flash for a whole web site.
to add to skunk's comment:
also, unless you really know what you're doing (using links to databases, calling up external dynamically generated text files etc), it's usually difficult to make a flash site maintainable. if it's your own little project...fine. but if you're doing a site for a client, you can't expect them to buy a copy of flash and go edit the text etc themselves when the info changes...
I would echo the above statements 100%. I have built a flash site, just sort of as an experiment/fun sort of thing more than anything else and now I'm sorry that I did it. The site hasn't been updated in a year and a half just because it's a pain in the bum!
I think that what I would do if I were you is work on smaller pieces, like intros (bad idea in practice, but good way to work on your skills), and smaller pieces. You do see a lot of sites now that are using flash for pieces of their layout while the rest is done in HTML.
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