Flash has its place on a website, but it is only a part of a whole not the whole thing.

Adobe Flash is a program that can be used to create beautiful video based elements of a website, Pople Web Design use it in some of our sites to give it a fresh lively feel or to perform complicated tasks which otherwise would need outsourcing to a £1000 a day programmer.

One of the great things about Flash is that it is well recognized by the web surfing world, and therefore can be viewed by the majority of visitors to a website but crucially not all visitors.

Making a website only in flash is common place but at time of writing slowly dying out, because is rather masochistic when it comes to SEF ness and usability, delivery of information, SEO, update ability ... the list goes on...

Search Engine Friendly?

An all flash website is disastrous for SEO, because the site is in one file (an swf) witch Google and any other search engines cannot read. Meaning that google cannot index your site and ascertain if the content of your site is what its customers (the public, your customers) are searching for. The search engines will rank a flash site badly unless lots of work is put into meta tags and other behind the scenes content. However even after doing this work which more often than not is not done. It will still never be possible to reach the same visibility as a dynamic site running a good CMS because a flash site is so static. On the other hand a good CMS will do all of the hard work for you in terms of SEF Urls and easily indexed content, it can easily produce a dynamic site map at a click of a button that will allow Google to find all the information on your website and make it available to your potential customers.

Usability,

Another sticking point of an all Flash website, one clear problem is that the back button does not work as you would expect, if you reach a website from a search engine navigate to another page on that site and then click the back button on your browser you are sent back to your search engine, or worse it doesn't work at all, which is annoying but no big deal as long as the site is easy to navigate so you can find what you wanted to return to, but you cant search inside a Flash site either, so if the site has more than a couple of pages and you want to know something specific, like the start date of the course your interested in or the cost of a weeks holiday in Brazil, you are left having to sift through the whole site to find it which is a waste of time as you can probably find the same else where.

Size and Download time,

Flash can be made to be fairly small but loses its quality when reduced in size and more often than not its left at over a mega byte, this results in the need for a preloaded or worse just a really long load time with no feedback that the site will ever arrive. If your doing a site with flash it needs to be less than 100kb maximum to load within a reasonable time. Total page size less than 30K is ideal, and should achieve sub eight second response times on 56K connections. Pages over 100K exceed most attention thresholds at 56Kbps, even with feedback. And since the many web users of the world are still using 56k including my neighbour. I believe that this is still a very valid value. I'm not saying every site has to be the anorexic google, but a nice slim yahoo is definitely the way web developers should still be leaning.

All in all Flash is great, As long as it is used as just a part of a site,

But only for the moving elements of a site and even then it should be kept as a solution amongst the others. With every attempt made to streamline the end product.