flash and music The Cool Side of Flash Clearly Flash is great for attracting attention. It's great for advertising on commercial web sites, for logo animations, for instructional pages or as a demonstration technique, it's superior to almost anything else on the web if you have music, photography or artwork that is copyrighted, since you can't print out or copy it from PC computers. Music reproduced in Flash also has a very high degree of fidelity, stereophonic in sound and nearly impossible to replicate. Flash may also be used to create mood or even illustrate a story, such as the example we created below. We create both Flash and gif animation. Occasionally gif animation may actually work better for your project. Perhaps you want the animation to be printable or you may prefer your animation to be visible on WebTV or those browsers where Flash is not visible. Animated gifs can also have links within them. Unfortunately, they load slower and movement is not as fluid as Flash. Music on Your Site? We only recommend music on a website where it's part of the dramatic effect or the site is about music, in which case, it can be a critical element. We can create high fidelity music in Flash and several other formats, depending on your needs. Music can have a calming effect or it can create a lot of excitement. It all depends on you. The Downside of Flash Those new to the web are dazzled the first time they see Flash and animation on the web. But in today's "PC savvy" society it is estimated only 1 in 30 people will sit through a Flash animation entry page on a web site! We are used to it now. Use Flash carefully, if at all. NEVER use it as a navigation tool (menu buttons). Probably due to wide usage of Flash in web advertising, new tools have emerged for blocking Flash content in some or all web sites, or temporarily or permanently turning Flash Player off, such as FlashBlock and Adblock for the Mozilla Firefox browser. Many web sites now rely on Flash being available by default on your browser and will not check if you have disabled it. You may be unable to access a particular web site if you disable Flash, or you may experience a degraded user interface. Using Flash content stores the content of the web page in a binary file. Since Flash uses animations, the design of the page is not static. Both these things make Flash pages unsuitable for indexing by search engines. 'Misuse' of Flash software has led to the creation of a new industry term "Flashterbation", because the technology is consistently used in a way that removes visitor interaction and control. Many who view your site on AOL, WebTV, Opera, and some older and European browsers will thank you for allowing them to actually see your site. Another problem is that search engines will rarely list a web site where Flash is used for navigation or information. The reason is that the engines were built for finding information. Only pure text set in the page can be read by the search engines because that is what they are programmed to read as "information." Many disreputable, amateur and adult web sites use an excess of Flash, so unfortunately, many search engines have simply stopped spidering sites with more than a small about of Flash content. Another drawback is if you are using a PC, you will find that your viewer cannot print a web page with flash. Those areas of the page remain blank. If you want to have Flash, and it's appropriate for your site, simply use it within an HTML page as one element of the total design. Above: An example of an animated gif image.   Some of the content above is quoted from Wikipedia.org.