Flash intros... advisable?

I don't know where to post this so I posted it here. There didn't seem to be any category to post to... web ethics? good web practices? lolx

ok here's it.

I am designing a portfolio/business site and would like to know if a flash intro is advisable. I mean, flash intros are notorious for their loading times but they can really impress, you know...

So its 'to impress' on one end of the spectrum and 'nah; the file is too big / the user might not want to see it' on the other end of the spectrum.

Do you think I should do a flash intro? ( of course, i'll put a skip intro link! )

Flash can and was originally designed to play while it loads. Some clever timeline manipulation can certainly manage this, even on diallup modems. This "I'll load the whole thing now and show it to you later" is a very bad way of doing things when it comes to intros.

If you do make an intro, it shouldn't be a visual and technical extravaganza, but an informative presentation to the user. If you can make it look good at the same time, then there's certainly no harm. Anyway, I have to rush, so I might post more later!

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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Rob - Webforumz Founder

<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.
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
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

I do have an intro now, but I will optimise it for search engines later. Well, the intro is basically in a page where text is displayed also ( NOT HIDDEN ). The intro is 640x280. The rest of the website's front page ( 1024x768) will contain text. Description of who we are what we offer and all that you know....

The flash intro is 'skippable'. Come on guys, its only 100kb and I can always use cookies to disable it for a returning user!

Besides, its sort of a portfolio site. Portfolio= show off!

Nonetheless, I'll make the intro as seamless as possible.