Flash Website Designs - To Flash or Not To Flash

What you see above is known as Flash animation. It is a design element developed by Macromedia Inc. (now owned by Adobe, Inc.) as an alternative method of bringing motion to static websites. Prior to the development of Flash, the only way to do that was using animated GIF files which were the equivalent of how old-time cartoons were made. A series of frames grouped together and displayed in sequence where each frame has a slight change to the subject. Because animated GIFs were comprised of a series of individual frames, the end result would always be a very large file size that took forever to download unless the dimension of the animation was very small and limited to just a few frames.

Flash changed all that and made it possible to create larger animations that incorporated more detail and more style while still maintaining a relatively low file size for downloading over regular dial up connections. That was many years ago.

To view Flash animation, your computer must have a special plugin or program installed on it called the Flash Player. When it was first developed everybody had to go to Macromedia's website and download the player. Nowadays it is already installed on your computer when you buy it.

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