The last five years has seen an exponential growth in the use of shockwave and flash animations in creating websites. The old tried and trusted techniques such as D/HTML are slowly moving over to make room for this newer multimedia delivery vehicle. Scripting, such as Javascript, is viewed with disdain by some and ignored by others. Yet the people who advocate the use of flash/shockwave in creating multimedia-rich sites are not asking the right question: Is all that glitters gold?

An important facet of flash / shockwave glossed over by Maryland website design is that these technologies are a packaged scripting environment: In other words most of what you can do in flash, you can do in DHTML with a little effort. A question that pops up at this stage is: Why would I want to go through all of that? The answer is simple and is illustrated by way of practical example.

Pick a topic any topic and type the relevant search keywords into your favorite search engine. Now try to find a flash site under the first thirty results. You will be surprised to find that this ‘silver bullet’ of web design does not even feature. The majority of search engines do not support the indexing of shockwave / flash sites this can have a detrimental effect on your Internet business if you rely on search engine traffic to generate revenue. Remember one thing: Content is king and the only recognized content is in HTML pages