Articles
[18/12/2009] Is flash website heavier than normal HTML website?
Your Website design is a key for the success of your website. Since the advent of internet, designers are always busy finding some or other way to improve website design. In this series the HTML/CSS coding is the most popular one and is most widely used.But the designers were not happy with HTML only. So the Flash websites came in action. Flash websites have numerous plus points. With flash, designers have found a platform from where they could design websites with great visual effects. They could now add anything to their design without thinking of the relative placements of objects, layers, tables, divisions, etc. Smooth movements with audio effects are very common in flash websites.
On the other hand HTML websites will lack such great features, but still they are easier to create, maintain and edit. They can be easily optimized for search engine which is difficult with Flash websites (Possible now with the advent of XTML). Also the pages in Flash Websites cannot be indexed in search engines.
Apart from these Flash Website has a very big problem. Loading a flash website can really be a hard work for surfers using telephone connections or dial up connections for internet. For a flash website to work you have to first download the entire website to your PC, Laptop etc. before you can view inside. In this sense we can say that flash websites are much heavier than the normal HTML websites. More over if the website in not designed with proper navigation then it may become difficult to revisit a page. At times you may need to replay the whole thing from first to view some pages again.
The reason behind the flash websites being heavy is that you have to download the entire flash content to navigate through the site. Secondly the high usage of graphics and animation makes the website very bulky. Also a user not having adobe flash player installed in his internet browser, needs to download it and install it before he can see the contents. This adds to the loading time. There is no such compatibility issue with HTML websites. So, it’s easy to load and only the pages the user chooses are loaded and not the entire website. It’s also not possible to print certain pages of a flash website which is quite easy in HTML websites.
So, overall we can say that Flash Websites have attractive designs capable of providing enriched visual effects, but take more time to load. So, it’s for sure that flash websites are heavier that the normal HTML Websites.
