Flash is a great web development tool. It’s interactive, animated, integrated, and has the potential to accomplish a whole lot more than other web technologies. As someone who has been working in Flash for over 10 years now, I have seen it evolve into something extremely powerful. From its beginnings as a simple interactive web animation tool, it has since become a robust application development platform, with broad support for dynamic database integration, video and audio publishing, and a host of other features that make it a joy to use for both designers, developers and marketers alike.

But just because Flash CAN do all those things, does that mean you should? That’s something that we as web designers struggle with on a regular basis: When and how do you use Flash effectively? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Flash? Here’s our opinion, and feel free to chime in with one of your own.

Good Flash: Enhancing existing content without sacrificing the content itself. Using Flash to enhance your points through animation or interactivity is always a good thing. It brings the content to life.

Bad Flash: Building animations and interactive elements that distract from the content. Animations that look cool, but overshadow the actual content are usually more annoying than they are enhancing. What would you rather have a visitor take away from your site: That animated 3D effects are really cool, or that your product/service is what they need? Unless you specialize in Flash development want to show off your skills, probably the latter.

Good Flash: Improving a standard HTML user interface/functionality. Standard HTML elements and tags have their limitations, and Flash allows developers and designers to rewrite the rules for how some of those items should function. The key is to make sure that it is a step forward, not a step backwards or too much a departure from the norm for regular users.

Bad Flash: Creating confusing/eccentric user interfaces. We’ve all run into a few of these. Where do I click? How do I get back to where I was? While creative, unless you are 100% sure that your target audience will understand what you intended, you should probably rethink your UI. The point of using Flash is to enhance the user’s experience, not make it more difficult.

Good Flash: Blending multimedia elements to enhance a good concept. When you have a concept that hinges upon multimedia elements (video/audio/photos) that Flash is your best option. A good example of this is the Porsche Bloodlines mini-site.

Bad Flash: Injecting audio and video for no good reason. I won’t give any examples here, but I think we have all seen these as well.

Good Flash: Remembering SEO. Google can actually index Flash files, but it takes a bit of configuring on the development side to make sure that it sees it well. It may also be advisable to include non-Flash versions of your content as well.

The list could go on and on, but I’ll stop here for now. What are your thoughts?

For those of you not familiar with the years old debate of CSS layouts versus table-based website design, here’s a quick recap. Tables, which are the same rows and column-based ones you use in your word-processing program, have been a staple in website design since the dawn of web pages. They are a quick and easy, accurate, and browser-compliant way to lay out items on a web page. Then came Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which sought to separate the design of a page from the content, so that style, design and layout changes could be made by simply editing the CSS file, making website design updates relatively simple, unlike the old method of having to change each table-based layout to the new design. Plus, the code was far simpler.

So the debate began. Some designers jumped into the “I love CSS” camp, others the “I’ll stick with tables until CSS is totally cross-browser compliant” camp. Here we are, several years later and the debate rages on. CSS is still not 100% browser compliant (thanks to the bane of most designers’ existence: IE), but people still don’t want to rely on tables when CSS makes things so much easier to stylize.

Having been knee deep in both situations, there’s no doubt in my mind that the best course of action is still a healthy combo of both CSS stylization and old-fashioned table layouts. Basic table layouts guarantee cross-browser compatibility, while CSS makes site-wide styles very easy to update and control. Until IE gets its act together with CSS, it’s probably the only way to maintain the accuracy of how your site is displayed.

I’m also finding that a lot of clients like to be able to maintain their own websites without the need for developing a database-driven Content Management System, which are great but can be costly versus simple static HTML sites. I had mentioned Adobe Contribute in another post, and Contribute works best with a good combo of tables and CSS, so that’s another reason I can hand a site off to a client and trust that they should not have any problems maintaining it themselves…

I’d love to hear other designers’ experiences, one way or the other.. What is your opinion of the CSS vs. Tables debate?

Now that my wife and I are in the market for a new house, it’s amazing to me how much data is out there and available via the web. From sites like Zillow.com and plenty of other data compilations, it’s tough to imagine how buyers and sellers made decisions without having every angle completely covered with statistics and projections. And although the data itself may not really give any one person a competitive advantage over another, it at least makes people feel more confident in their decisions. And when you can make people feel confident, it usually means a sale. (more…)