Don’t start with flash
That was the first thing that I was told when I attended the Wed Design Boot Camp conducted by the Society for News Design in Chicago last weekend.
For one, Google’s search engines can’t read the data within Flash scripts, rendering fancy flash sites difficult to find. Where possible, the instructors from the 
New York Times and NPR say, start with HTML and Flash elements should only be incorporated later. Many news websites were also starting to add flash for the sake of adding them – don’t we all hate those tiny text in a minute box will a hard-to-use scroll bar. Also, the tendency that Flash sites are arbitrarily designed mean users have to “re-learn” how to navigate the site.
That said, I’ve seen some of the most amazing uses of Flash on the New York Times site. The recount of the Virginia Tech Shootings is a perfect example. So it seems that Flash works well with as a form of animated info graphics – maps, timelines, graphs and charts.
Other notable mentions include one done by Reuters and the LA Times. I for one am not fond of gimmicky flash games – with the exception of those that actually convey a message, like this. (On a side note, the texting game had its subhead coded in HTML, making it more “searchable”. The V-Tech Flash had its title and subhead embedded in the Flash graphic, making it slightly harder to find – I had to go through the story page instead of clicking to it from Google.)
