In the animated movie "the Incredibles" there is a wonderful scene where Edna (clothing designer for the superheroes) explains to Mr Incredible all of the reasons why he shouldn’t have a cape on his next super-suit. At the end, she sums it all up nicely: No Cape!

It’s the same with flash on website splash pages… No flash!

Frankly, I suspect that the only reason why designers put flash onto the front pages of websites is to impress their clients with some gee-whizz stuff. Well, the novelty quickly wears off, and generally the "skip" button is the first thing that gets pressed as soon as someone enters the site. Either that or they just go away from the site altogether. And then they stay away.

You want people to come back to your site again and again – not just once. A flash intro becomes very boring, very quickly. The same thing goes for animated flash backgrounds on other parts of the site. Unless you are prepared to invest in having the flash content updated (on a weekly or perhaps daily basis), then your site will quickly become stale.

Instead, why not concentrate on giving your visitors a reason to come back to your site – by providing them with updated content: information, articles, newsfeeds?

Now, don’t get me wrong – flash absolutely has a place: as content – but not as decoration!