Flash Design & Rich Media

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Flash is an extremely powerful medium for delivering media, be it video, audio or animation. It also lends itself perfectly to the creation of complex user interfaces and visually stunning web applications such as would be found used in viral campaigns. Adobe Air also provides the perfect platform to bridge the gap between web and desktop applications by bringing the best of both worlds together to provide a powerful development tool.

Flash Design

Flash Design is the skill of manipulating images and content using Adobe Flash and animating them to form extremely impressive presentations or movies in their own right. Using Flash to re-inforce your message can be a great way of keeping visitors on your site, or even driving new traffic. Sometimes using a well considered animation rather than a flat image is the only way to really get your point across.

Flash Development

Flash is not just a visual application, it can used to develop complex web and desktop based applications. It is especially effective in developing games, viral campaigns and content managed presentations or web based magazines.

When not to use Flash

Although Flash can be used for delivering all your web content it’s not recommended. The primary reason for this is that Search Engines cannot spider Flash content, so it remains invisible and is not taken into account in search results. There are of course exceptions to this, such as rich media viral campaigns, however we would also suggest that the content was backed up by well formed HTML content so that Search Engines can also digest it. In the main part Flash is invisible to search engines. If you are of any doubt then look at a Flash site using a text browser like Lynx.

One of the most requested uses of Flash, and one of the biggest ‘no nos’, is the Flash splash screen; the opening intro animation which then leads you through to the main site. This was pre-dominantly used during the 1990′s and early 2000′s but should be avoided at all costs. If you take into consideration what has been said above about Flash and search engines then the ‘splash screen’ provides a barrier to search engines and can completely scupper your SEO efforts. Don’t do it!

Flash summary

Flash can manipulate vector and raster graphics, and supports bi-directional streaming of audio and video. It contains a scripting language called ActionScript. Several software products, systems, and devices are able to create or display Flash content, including Adobe Flash Player, which is available free for most common web browsers, some mobile phones and for other electronic devices (using Flash Lite). The Adobe Flash Professional multimedia authoring program is used to create content for the Adobe Engagement Platform, such as web applications, games and movies, and content for mobile phones and other embedded devices.