Coolness Has its Price Seven reasons to avoid using Flash on your website

There's no doubt about it: Websites designed in Flash are cool. They're animated, interactive, multimedia eye candy. You see it, and you want it. Unfortunately, coolness has a price, and if a web designer sells you on Flash, you will be paying that price from Day One and for every second your site is live.

Here's a breakdown of the costs of incorporating Flash in your website design and user interface:

Development cost. Flash development is highly specialized and costs significantly more than standard website development. (As a rule of thumb, Flash will end up costing you 50 percent to 100 percent more than HTML or JavaScript programming on an hourly basis.) In addition, any content updates require a call to the Flash developer, who may not be readily available at the time.