HTML/Tables or FLASH

[Holly]

In the process of doing my website.. So far it is faced with flash and some <img HTML coding with tables... However Im thinking of just purchasing a complete FLASH website since I dont think I can make this all myself with the gallery etc... not yet anyway..

Do you think viewers prefer the flash or regular HTML with tables?

Thanks!

Holly

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[JDS]

I personally prefer the speed and simplicity of HTML. Most of the flash galleries I've seen use a lot of animation, which is cool the first couple times you see it. I just don't like watching ..every.. ..single.. ..photo.. slide into and out of view and that sort of thing.

Don't get me wrong..flash is cool too. It helps to keep people from stealing your images too - no right-click -> save image. But if you do go with flash, try to keep all the animations to a minimum, or at least make 'em speedy.

[jdunphy]

Flash can be a good thing for your actual gallery, since it will protect your images from Save As.. and it makes a nice clean interface for viewing and preloading a bunch of images.

I wouldn't reccommend creating an entire site in flash, though. If you're going to have supplementary pages or pricing info, I would use HTML to do all of that work. Keep in mind that there are still some people out there who either don't have flash installed, or have an old version of flash installed. Trust me. I hear about this a few times a week at my work.

This may not be a major thing for you, (It depends on whether or not you're hoping to generate traffic from web searches) but when a site is done up in flash, search engines like Google, etc. can't follow any of the links in your site, basically meaning that they skip it and it won't get indexed.

My preferred design would be a tableless HTML setup using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to organize the formatting of the site. Unfortunately, that's just one more thing you'd have to learn how to use before completing your site. If HTML w/Tables will get you to a completed site sooner, I'd say you should go that route.

[morydd]

And remember, flash only offers a bit of protection, you can't Save As... but screen capture still works fine. I personally think you're better off using HTML with CSS and then keeping your images relatively low-res and watermarking them. As jdunphy points out, search engines don't follow links in flash, so that makes your site a bit harder to find. I think using the latest and greatest is fine for your personal page, but I feel that sites for businesses should be "Grandma Friendly". Which includes thing like not preventing the user from resizing text with their browser.

[markc]

Flash is, well, flashy. Many flash sites sacrifice speed for looks, which annoys me. I'm rather old school, but I usually prefer HTML to FLash. Flash breaks so many things that are standard web practices (like text size, as morydd mentioned).

[Tiberius]

I'll be honest: I hate flash. It's slow to run, (utterly unusable on my P3 Laptop with most sites), it's slow to navigate (I want a simple, informative site, not cute powerpoint-like transitions), and it's inflexible (you can easily design HTML/CSS sites to scale across screen resolutions, etc.). It provides no security that HTML doesn't thanks to the PrtScrn key. Just majorly downsize and blatantly watermark.

[Holly]

Thanks for all the input every one! Im glad I asked.. It will save on a flash template for sure... I will stick with Javascript gallery for the time being... It works and well its not TO bad to put together..

Im clueless with CSS style sheets unless it comes with a program.. Thanks again!

[ksmattfish]

I can only speak for myself, but when I get to a website, and fancy flash presentations take more than a few seconds to load, I leave the website. Keep your website simple, and dazzle your visitors with your photographs.

[jemmy]

I agree... I leave any website that takes soooooooooo long to load. I've also heard that not everyone can get flash (not compatible??) on all computers?? Not sure if this is right, but if it is, I think I will steer clear of it. I want EVERYONE to be able to view and hopefully enjoy my site!!... which reminds me... i must pull my finger out and work on mine some more... soooooooooo another language to me all that html stuff. Anyway, am thinking about paying some poor other bugga to help me x lol x