Reasons Why Flash Isnt Brilliant
Flash is a great little thing that you can have on your site that will in fact make users go "wow that's pretty cool" perhaps if your lucky, and this will be for the first time users only. Once the first look it will start to get very old very quickly to people and they will start to get a bit annoyed by how long the site is taking to load.
99.9% of the time flash will give you a usability disease. There are some good designs of flash and it has to be said that when it is done right it looks simply fantastic but most of the time they are just awful websites.
Why is it that flash will push people out?
Encourages Design Abuse
Breaks Fundamental Interaction Principles
Directs Attention For The Site's Value
One of the big mistakes that people make when thinking about having their site designed is that they think flash animation is going to attract people to the site. Of course it will be a success if you have the budget but this is not likely as a decent looking flash site is going to cost you possible thousands upon thousands.
Of ocurse one of the other problems is time, it takes a long time to design a site like this. The thing is, it can tajke a very long time indeed to get the animation together and this could just be for one page alone?
A small bit of flash on the site can be very useful indeed and look brilliant but I would never say to go too far with it as it just takes too long to load.
If you are struggling to realise just how you want your site designed then I suggest getting a decent web design team involved.
Of course if you have a site and it isn't doing well you could bring in the SEO team.