Quote Originally Posted by pauland View Post
...but I've seen many naff ones in HTML myself.
Very true.

Quote Originally Posted by pauland View Post
Check out this thread: http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...629#post186629
I think this is an issue that we will have to agree to disagree on. I look at that site and see examples of almost everything that is wrong with Flash sites.

First it has a landing page telling me where I can download Flash, I already have Flash installed. In most cases I would move on to the next site right now, but I'll still give this one a try. So I click the enter button and wait...and wait...and wait. It takes about 30 seconds of looking at a spinning progress bar for the site to load. What do I get? Another landing page with an enter button, you've got to be kidding me. This is like placing an order in a restaurant and having the waiter come back to the table twice, before giving the order to the kitchen, to ask if I really want to order the fish. Under normal circumstances there is no way that I would still be around.

The site finally lets me in and it looks nice. Fortunately, I'm working on a laptop with a 1024x768 display so I don't have the small font issues that others have reported in the thread you linked to. Personally, I find all of the sliding panels distracting but you can certainly do that without Flash too. Everything is going ok until I get to the thumbnail gallery. I'm back to the spinning progress bar. It seems to take about 3-5 seconds from when I click on an image until it starts to display. That is far to long for these modestly sized pictures.

There are also the general issues that I raised earlier, i.e. the back button doesn't work properly. Although I haven't really tested it, loading this site in a text browser suggests that it is not accessible to users of nonvisual browsers. Argueably this is not as much of an issue for this site as its primary goal is to provide visual information about previous building designs. However, we shouldn't forget The Blind Billionaire (Google). How am I going to find the name of that architect who designed that really cool addition for my boss's friends in east Dulwich?

My main complaint about this site, and most other Flash sites, is that form has been allowed to dictate function. The users experience has been comprimised because of the designers desire to control all aspects of the sites display, without acknowledgeing that users will inevitably be viewing the site under "unusual" conditions, e.g. using a monitor with a resolution of 1920x1200 so they can't read the tiny font. Finally, I don't see Flash really adding anything to this site, most of the same graphical effects could be achieved with XHTML+CSS+JavaScript, so why put up with its drawbacks?