Hi,
We are revising our company website and I wondered if it considered bad practise to use flash on the home page.
This would cause issues for those users who dont have flash installed (and maybe dont want flash)
Thanks
+2
A:
Not in and of itself - use flash sparingly and make sure it degrades gracefully.
Galwegian
2010-01-06 10:12:54
The "degrades gracefully" part can be accomplished by creating a div with the same dimensions of your flash movie, sticking a static background image of the flash movie in side it, then use Javascript (such as jQuery's swfobject) to add the flash object inside the div.
Paperjam
2010-01-10 05:48:17
A:
It depends on the type of your company and customers. If you're in the business of web development, it is quite reasonable to display your abilities at the home page. In any other case, it might cause annoyance to users, and better be avoided.
You must ask yourself what are you users looking for, and will the flash animation interfere with their journey within the site, or enhance their experience.
Adam Matan
2010-01-06 10:13:07
+1
A:
It depends if it's for a critical part of your site.
I recently got burned by failing to get results on a PC without flash when looking up rail times on the UK's National Rail site. Instead of displaying results, I got nothing. I'd consider that a fairly critical failure of a train times site.
If you must use Flash for something critical, provide a fallback that detects the absence of Flash, and shows a stripped-down version.
Dominic Rodger
2010-01-06 10:13:09