Charity Website Tips: Use Flash Sparingly
Flash presentations – particularly as an intro page to your website, are extremely irritating for most web users. They want to get straight to the information on your website, choosing what they want to see, rather than having to wait for your video/animation to complete. Flash can be used in effective ways, to add a dynamic edge to a page, but consider if this could be achieved using alternative techniques such as using Javascript and CSS. Libraries such as jQuery make many popular effects very easy to achieve.
If you do decide you need a Flash intro for any reason, make sure that you still have navigation on the page so visitors can explore the rest of your website. At the very least have a skip intro link that takes them to the next page of your website. Make sure these links are done in standard HTML so that they appear before the flash has finished loading.
It is very easy to use Flash in bad ways. Only very experienced web designers should be contracted to provide you with Flash designs otherwise you may find your website ineffective, slow, and inaccessible to search engines.
Everywhere you use Flash, remember that some people won’t see it as they won’t have Flash installed or will have an older version that may not be capable of displaying your animation. Make sure you specify an alternative, static representation so that these users still receive a good experience when browsing your website.
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