<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="geneva, verdana, arial" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Originally posted by Rob

Lets try and remember that search engines especially google love textual content on home pages (and loads of it).

Google hates flash intro pages... coz there is no text.

And before anyone suggests it... hidden text will only get you banned from the indexes.
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Its not only google...

I think most users hate them too... depends on the nature of the site, if it is a site that you hope people will return to regularly then NO NO NO don't put flash on it. We've had customers who wanted a flash intro, when the did eventually get one they asked to remove it around a month later, said users of their sites were sick of it.

If it is a branding exercise then I guess its okay, you know the sort of site that doesn't have anything to say.

Most inflictions of flash that I see are designers trying to w*nk off rather than something that is going to make things better for site users. Flash can be great for showing interactive demos of products (mobile phone sites spring to mind, seen good demos of smart phones) but mostly for intros its just there to show off the designers skills.

This is one example of a cr@p one I saw, good use of flash on mobile phone demo, but spoiled by the unintuitive navigation, I sat there for around 20 seconds clicking at random to find out how to access the other pages. They could have done this much better using HTML with the flash movies within the pages.

http://www.sonyericsson.com/P800/
/flash rant over