Just recently i have been looking for inspiration in web design, having been bogged down in backend development it is easy to overlook the beauty of many websites, the elegance of their design.

I was recently having a discussion worth a co-worker about the merits of flash websites over XHTML version. Being experienced in both fields i feel that Flash is far more of a designers playground, the action scripting required is a lot more focused around basic commands, although this can be made more complex. In Truth Flash is a much more conceptual space in which to develop, but flash is a dreamer if you will, the reality is that nearly 50% of the worlds population is still on dial-up, the very idea of them spending 20 mins waiting for your flash based webapp or site to load is ludacris. With this comes the sad truth that flash websites are notoriously hard to spider on search engines, having no HTML text for google spiders to read and relying completely on meta tages will only get a flash site so far.

Having said all this Flash does have one overriding success that in that no matter what browser or OS you run the site will look and feel the same.

I believe the best approach we deciding is to contemplate the strengths of both models, and impliment a compromise, that is why many of my sites use what i like to call flash “components” which gives the user the best of both worlds, the razzle dazzle of moving parts, combined with the practicality and adaptability of a web based SEO compliant site. As i like to think of it the best of both worlds.