Is flash website design no longer used or relevant?

well, there’s more than enough flash commercial, personally it drives me mad, my G4 isn’t the sharperst tool in the shed, and i just get browsing slowdown because of all that flash junk…i could do withoout it

Hardly irrelevant, but you don’t see as many full-on, all-flash sites very often these days. Nobody misses intro movies, I think. Some flash sites are awesome, but I would only use it for something (pardon the pun) flashy, like movie preview sites, design portfolios…stuff like that. I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon, though; it can be very useful, but I think a lot of people has realized it doesn’t have to used all the time. Better to use flash elements here and there. Here’s a link that might be interesting:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/05/05/flash_wars_adobe_in_the_history_and_future_of_flash_part_1_of_3.html

A lot of it has to do with SEO. Flash files/sites come across in the search engines as an image. The search engines cannot pull text from images so a flash site is not optimized nor is it easily found in natural search results.

People have finally started using it for what it was made for, which is video content and gaming platforms (plus the other odd innovation). Beats crappy button rollovers and simple “FX!”.

I think people got really excited when it first came out, but now that things have calmed down there is more of a focus on elegance and usability instead of ignorance and excitability.

I think the web has improved, but that doesn’t make Flash irrelevant. Just better used.

Same reason splash pages died. Or atleast, they should be dead by now.

The Flex platform has taken Flash to the next level. Flex applications are gaining popularity for Rich Internet Application development.

glial has it – Flash has matured far past the “skip intro” days and is being used more and more for application development (just look at Adobe’s own Flex built version of Photoshop). It is still used obnoxiously on banner ads which is really detrimental to its reputation since some of the finest things on the web are crafted with it IMO. In my work I’ve found it best to be used in three ways:

1) a full-blown application that is reached by a SEO friendly entry page,
2) small “widgets” or tools on a page that add some enhanced interactivity but are not required for the page to be functional and
3) design accents that require or are improved with animation (but used sparingly)

Let’s throw this out there…

Flash used right (you would hope so): http://kuler.adobe.com
Flash used wrong: http://www.aceofcakestv.com

I think Veerle heard you. (This was posted just today.) http://veerle.duoh.com/blog/comments/does_flash_irks_me/

Flash is not dead and more people seem to be using it correctly. Most of the work I do is with hybrid Flash/xHTML/CSS sites. I like Flash. If it is used as an option to enhance the site, rather than deliver the entire message, I see nothing wrong with using it.

Check out: http://www.thefwa.com for full-blown Flash sites.

i’ve never cared for flash, it is bulky, slow and usually poorly executed. I won’t take clients who want flash websites anymore.