Flash animation is a great way to create high quality animation with small file size. Although animated gifs are the simplest way to have animation that's universally understood by all the major browsers, (Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera and some people still use Netscape) much higher quality animation can be achieved using Flash and the result is a nice, small, quickly downloading file.

Here are two examples of Flash animation used for large portfolio sections to showcase the owner's work.


Once the Flash file (swf) is downloaded, the user can look around the portfolio without having to wait for each image to load. Of course an added bonus is a zippy .2 or so second transition between sections or images that looks cool and adds a little panache to the presentation of work in the portfolio. The only possible drawback to Flash is that the Flash movie player must be installed on the browser for the movie to work. Most later versions of browsers automatically include the Flash player, but if a user doesn't have it, they'll be prompted to download it and they may not want to bother with it.

That being said, I'm a Flash animator, not a Flash programmer. If you want a Flash-based web site with games or that sort of thing, I'd be happy to refer you to some excellent Flash programmers.

I like to keep web sites simple and accessible to as many users as possible, and let the search engines find the text they're looking for on your web pages.

Here are a couple Flash intros. For the purpose of search engine optimization, I don't recommend using a Flash intro on your web site unless it's inside a cell within the body of your web page, with your site's navigation in plain html.

home | web sites | flash | services | artwork tracey@polyflavor.com | 212-477-5512