What does user want to see in a web site?

The most powerful magnetize web technology seems to be flash from graphical point of view. But mostly it is being misused in web designs.

Thinking of what kind of business is, we should focus on what our target audience are looking for.

Flash can be used to impress most of the audience, however concrete evidence still point to the fact that most of the web users utilize the web to find information and they are mostly looking for

• Quality of content


• Ease of navigation


• Speedy access


• Use of right language/vocabulary


• Color mixing

Users always consider the web a highly interactive medium: they are unlikely to watch a computer screen for long periods of time without giving some sort of input.

Flash technology in terms of use presents several problems against the way people browse the sites. Few are list as below:

• Load time and bandwidth constrains:

As most of the user have dial up connection the flash designed sites take long time to download and consume vast amount of bandwidth of broadband connection as well. Time is money and user can not spend valuable time watching the load bar, instead of getting the information they need. So your site should be light enough in sense to its loading time which called a user friendly site.

• Usability restrain:

Some time you use the older or newer version for flash site designed some time the back buttons does not work and it will take you out of the flash site. So standard color of visited and not visited links will not work and users have no control over the text size they wanted to use.

Since flash technology favors the presentation style and resembles to a video but consumers get bored after a while no matter how well the graphics looks.

• Search Engine Limitations:

You will have a hard time for achieving high ranking with a flash site because not every search engine have the flash indexing capabilities although the search engines like Google have some flash indexing ability, but still they are very limited. There is one option to solve this matter is to convert your site to HTML version but it drag you to unnecessary time and cost, since in most of the time HTML version will get your job done.

There are some areas where flash technology can help you:

• When you want to show a presentation of your product demo etc.


• When you want to develop interactive games like yahoo and hotmail.


• When you want to look your site modest in this case small flash animation or a banner embedded in HTML document will not consume unnecessary bandwidth, will load fast and will improve the exterior of the site.

Issues like slow download and search engine un-friendliness still a problem but macromedia (the company that developed Flash) is actively working to improve flash usability and other problems. Until these issues are solved, you will be need to use less flash where you wanted to enhance the value of your content.