Let me ask you though, are potential customers coming to your web site to be entertained or to gather information? Unless your answer is "to be entertained," don't waste your visitors' time with Flash.
Reasons to avoid Flash:
- While flash intros and pages may win design awards, they lose by being slow and harder to navigate than html.
- Everybody's in a hurry. Why would you make someone wait 20 seconds to get through an animation to find out your message when you could otherwise deliver it instantly? Show your visitors some respect!
- Bandwidth hiccups can make you look stupid. Face it, even on a high speed connection you still get some connectivity ups and downs. Your Flash looks like crap if this happens before it's loaded or during its load time.
- It costs you money. I have yet to see a single a/b test where a Flash home page beat a static page in terms of conversion.
P.S. If you have a requirement that Flash can help you fulfill, by all means go for it. As a tool it can be brilliant - as a strategy it's horrendous.
P.P.S. Yes, I know there are some great Flash web sites out there. However, they are almost all for brand oriented companies who don't sell online (liquor, soft drinks, etc).
