Flash

- Erick Ward

Flash can be a valuable tool for creating any Web Site, but I feel that it needs to be used wisely on a journalistic site. On entertainment or other sites, flash is an amazing tool because it makes the site look really professional and its interactivity is perfect for holding people's attention. All of that is the same for news and journalism sites, but too much flash can take away from the reader's concentration on the news content.

That is not to say that we shouldn't learn as much as we can about flash and use it on our sites, it just means that we have to be careful to use it in the right places. Basic news stories, that are easy to explain and don't have any captivating visual images, don't need flash just to have flash. I think it takes away from the story, when you force a flash image on the reader.

Flash is most valuable in explaing complex images and stories to the reader. For one of my previous post I looked at a Web Site on the War in Iraq and it had a lot of useful flash media. A lot of the pictures were roll over images that gave a better description to what was going on in the image, or had video come up to describe the season. Flash made a complex story easier to understand and made it interesting and captivating to read about.