Flash banners (those of .swf extension) are becoming very common in Internet promotion – they are so frequently used because of Macromedia Flash is a rather simple tool to produce complicated animation effects of fine quality. Though, my experience shows that this type of banner has several drawbacks.
The first one is that leading browsers do not initially support Flash – additional plug-ins are required. Furthermore, it sometimes happens, that to view banners produced in later Flash versions downloading newer plug-ins is needed. Statistics show that 75% of users feature Microsoft Internet Explorers (data from www.w3schools.com) – most of them are users with basic skills that are less likely to download any upgrades.
In Macromedia Flash animated banners a delay is set between frames. In case web-page visitor is using … a not very advanced machine, it is likely that wile loading the page the banner will also be loading slowly – user will not get the necessary info from it, as he will not wait for the next frame to appear.
Another inconvenience of not only Flash banners, but also of Flash web-sites is that right-click on the link or banner does not offer a possibility to open it in new window or in the same window. This is often annoying, especially when about 15 windows are already opened – new window increases CPU usage.
Though, Flash banners have some advantages in comparison with animated .gif banners – Flash banners' use vector animation, thus a big size banner occupies less memory than ordinary one of the same size. Actually, basing on experience I can say that .gif animated banners can only be effectively used for small banners with 2-3 frames.
The major advantage of Flash banner is the range of available colors – .gif format offers a very limited range of only 256 colors – very little for a decent banner. Flash provides palette of much wider choice of colors, quality of banner improves immensely.
To conclude I can only advise to use Flash for big size banners (at least 468x60 pixels) or for pop up banners – than the quality does really matter. But to draw a small animated "button" 88x31 px, the usage of Flash will be obsolete.
By Artjom Sharafejev, for First Banner Museum (http://www.firstbannermuseum.com/)
