Web Design Irvine - The Importance of Flash Design

Home to some of the leading web design firms in Southern California, Irvine, located in central Orange County has been providing quality web development services for years. One of the key characteristics to Irvine’s success is the rapid expansion of web development companies setting up shop in town. These companies owe a lot of their success to Flash software. Without Flash, many web pages just wouldn’t be as effective or aesthetic. Allow us to take a look at what Flash has to offer, as well as its impact on the industry.

Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) is a proprietary, robust graphics animation or application development program used to create and deliver dynamic content, media (such as sound and video), and interactive applications over the web via the browser.
Flash is not a standard produced by a vendor-neutral standards organization like most of the core protocols and formats on the Internet. Flash is much more restrictive than the open HTML format, though, requiring a proprietary plugin to be seen, and it does not integrate with most web browser UI features like the "Back" button.

According to a study, 98% of US Web users have the Flash Player installed. Numbers vary depending on the detection scheme and research demographics.

Many graphic artists use Flash because it gives them exact control over every part of the design, and anything can be animated and generally "jazzed up". Some application designers enjoy Flash because it lets them create applications that do not have to be refreshed or go to a new web page every time an action occurs. Flash can use embedded fonts instead of the standard fonts installed on most computers. There are many sites which forgo HTML entirely for Flash. Other sites may use Flash content combined with HTML as conservatively as gifs or jpegs would be used, but with smaller vector file sizes and the option of faster loading animations. Flash may also be used to protect content from unauthorized duplication or searching. Alternatively, small, dynamic Flash objects may be used to replace standard HTML elements (such as headers or menu links) with advanced typography not possible via regular HTML or CSS (see Scalable Inman Flash Replacement).

Flash detractors claim that Flash websites tend to be poorly designed, and often use confusing and non-standard user-interfaces. Up until recently, search engines have been unable to index Flash objects, which has prevented sites from having their contents easily found. This is because many search engine crawlers rely on text to index websites. It is possible to specify alternate content to be displayed for browsers that do not support Flash. Using alternate content also helps search engines to understand the page, and can result in much better visibility for the page. However, the vast majority of Flash websites are not disability accessible (for screen readers, for example) or Section 508 compliant. An additional issue is that sites which commonly use alternate content for search engines to their human visitors are usually judged to be spamming search engines and are automatically banned.

is an Object-Oriented language, allowing the use of CSS, XML, and the design of class-based web applications.

For more articles on Web Design Irvine (located within Orange County, California):
Web Design Irvine
Web Design Irvine - Flash
Web Design Irvine - Web Accessibility Issues
Web Design Irvine - Effective Website Planning