Thanks for your comment. After spending a few minutes on your non-Flash site I applaud your unbiased viewpoint. It’s charitable of you to be philanthropic with your sentiments towards the Flash brigade.

You’ll note that I didn’t express distaste for every use of Flash. I agree there are rare examples when Flash works: for the pompous designer, for instance, who got a copy of the application for his birthday and couldn’t wait to get straight on the path to Object Oriented Programming. Or the beer company that thinks it sage to baffle its target audience that can barely click a link by offering up a sensatronic swirly 360-degree navigation device that Stephen Hawking would struggle to compute. Flash does have its uses. I have an old copy of Flash that I use to stop my table from ‘wonking’. And I hear you can also use the packaging in the manifestation of a safe, for said carton would have as much chance of being stolen as used toilet paper or an Everton scarf.

Seriously, I agree that there are very isolated cases of Flash being applied in the correct manner. I have yet to find these sites to which you refer but I am sure they exist. What I have yet to discover is a Flash-based site that has usability at its core. True UX. The sort of thing that makes you feel like you’re cosied up on a Chesterfield armchair with a Monte Cristo in one hand, and a Venezuelan model in the other.

I’m an Everton fan, by the way. I just prefer the material of my Ted Baker neck warmer…

While I do agree that it’s very silly to use it for something like an intro screen, using it to design a whole website can be quite engaging. In effect, it makes the internet more like TV. The fact is, people want to be entertained wherever they go and that includes online.

There are some fantastic examples of full Flash-based websites that just wouldn’t work as well in something more static.

I also think that Flash doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be unclean and cluttered. That’s more up to the designer, rather than the application.