Are there any downsides to Flash?

So far you must be thinking, wow! This Flash program must be the best thing ever!

Unfortunately as with most things in life nothing is perfect. Flash has several downsides, firstly:

Bandwidth

Users of the internet with anything slower than Broadband may struggle, if your Flash website is too slow to load then people may not stay. Even with broadband some designers push the envelope in terms of how long someone is willing to wait for the next part of a site to load.

Keep in mind your audience and what they want to see, for example making a 10 minute fancy into that is pointless without an option to skip it, someone else's website is only a click away! This however is not as much of a problem if your Flash project is and application downloaded to the hard drive etc.

Usability

All web sites from October the 1 st 2004 (in the UK) have to have some form of accessibly built into it to cater for the disabled.

For example a normal HTML based site can have text that is scalable from your browsers setting, flash on the other hand is not as flexible.

Using the Flash program

What we mean by this is that certain parts of the program are not as good as others. Flash has got better over the years but it has its faults.

The drawing tools

Lets face it they are not great to use, to the point you may consider using alternative 'vector' based programs to create your art work and import it in.

The timeline

A fantastic way to display your events, but only when you get accustomed to it, at first it looks complicated so hold on in there and stick with it!

Action Scripting

To anybody who is not technical it can scare the life out of you... don't be and use this site to find some examples/links to help you, after all that is what this site is all about...

Good luck and enjoy!
(the TFE team)