Animation and more in particular Macromedia Flash can turn the web into a medium capable of expressing rich visual and audio messages, and highly interactive content, but it is important to know when to use it and when not.

When to Use Animations?

• As an intro, to 'WOW' people, as long as there is a way to skip the intro. No-one wants to see the same thing over-and-over, especially when the intro is rather lengthy.
• To draw attention to: a change of state, something new or important, process.
• To increase branding and image management in order to give the customer the sense of luxury, importance.
• To create compelling, entertaining and interactive content.

When Not to Use Animations?

• Just for the 'WOW' effect, to be flashy or to show-off.
• Showing that you use the latest technology.
• Building your whole Web Site in Flash might become a problem as search engines' Robots, Spiders, Crawlers, etc... can't interpret Flash and will therefore not index your Site.
• If your pages contain a lot of text or need accessible viewing for people who use voice readers, have limited motor skills or when you need unicode (international characters) support.
• Your content has to be searchable or readable on portable devices (cell phones, PDAs).
• If you would like to allow bookmarking of individual pages or sections.
• If you have a limited budget.
• If you need dynamic content generation (database driven).
• When the Developer you use is not proficient in Flash; there are a lot of things you need to know in order to be a good Flash Developer. Everyone can create a Flash animation in a few minutes and unfortunately they are a lot of books in circulation that would like you to believe this. The same is true for Web Developers.