Flash website gallery: Pros and cons of usage in a website

For every website proper exposure is a must. To make a site attractive we some times use animations! Whenever we name animation, flash comes first in our mind. Interestingly if we find creation of a full flash site difficult for budget or any other reasons we attempt at least a flash website gallery. And it is proven that a gallery has great importance to a website. A gallery always helps to express things better than simple text or images! Not just a flash gallery can attract visitors to your products or services; it can also be made interactive in guiding the visitors in use of your site. However, a gallery created with flash can come down as a backlash for its slow loading, annoying attitude or search engine unfriendliness.

I am a freelance graphic designer and have come across situations when clients want to know if they should use flash website gallery in their website or not? I never discourage them but do like to inform the following things for better returns on their investment on building a fantastic website. Let’s have a look at first on some pros:

• Attention grabbing: The first thing a website aims at is to attract the users to its products and services. Simply putting some static images in your photo gallery you can hardly keep the visitors glued to look at the products or the images! A flash website gallery would keep your visitors mesmerized with its style of approach to the users.


• Better exposure of everything: Whether it is your family photography or the images of your products or services, you would like to see those better exposed. Just using a flash website gallery you get the better opportunity to expose the images in various modes. A simple image can be turned into a video gallery with expertise of a flash developer.


• An interactive guide: Yes, would you mind to guide your visitors properly with an interactive attitude? No, you would love to do so! Just using flash website gallery you can make your site interactive providing audio visual approach. Simply the potentiality of visitors turning into customers increases manifold.

Let us now see some of the drawbacks of using flash website gallery in your site:

• Some animations can be annoying: It is fact that not always we like the over animation – non-stop audio of forced visit to a flash gallery. It is also found that sometimes the sites are full of animation and fewer places are found with text. So this situation should be avoided for sure.


• Inexperience makes things mess: I am not against the use of flash website gallery! But some times for the inexperience of developers heavy flash files are created. Again there is no guarantee that the user’s internet connection is on average! In these cases the files load slowly and the users may not wait to see your beautiful presentation for sure!


• Flash is not search engine friendly: It is till date true that Flash is not very much search engine friendly or in other words search crawlers cannot read the flash website gallery. So your presentations would hardly be found in the search engine results page. So the gallery is not coming up with the expectation posed on it. Your investment in building such gallery can go to sea to some extent.

So in this way hopefully you have understood how far useful a flash website gallery can be made! At the same time due to the lack of experience of the flash developers your investment can go into sea. But you can avoid such situation if you get the suggestion or expertise of an experienced designer. Again it is clear that limited use of flash can fetch out great result. To know how expert a designer is you should visit their web & graphic design portfolio. You would get an overall idea of the ability of the designer.