1Percenter

Flash intros aren’t looked highly upon in the web design community and with good reason. Web surfers have notoriously short attention spans, so you don’t want to make them sit through a movie to get into your site.

With that said, I’ve never been able the shake the feeling that Flash intros did in fact provide some sort of value. I could never put my finger on quite what that value was until recently it hit me: Flash intros are the “grand entrance halls” of the web.

By “grand entrance hall” I mean what you see when they open the front door on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” A huge room with a marble staircase, high ceiling and a gravity-defying chandelier.

The Value of “Grand Entrance Halls” and Flash Intros

The point of a “grand entrance hall” is to immediately communicate your wealth to your visitors. It gets this point across, not only with its extravagant decorations, but also with its utter disregard for good use of space. Having a big open room in your house is expensive, especially one that satisfies no basic human need.

Flash intros do the same thing for your website. They look expensive. For businesses, communicating to your web visitors that you have money is important. It signals to potential customers that you probably aren’t a fly-by-night company and that you’ll be around to continue supporting the products you sell.

The Limitations of Flash Intros

While “grand entrance halls” and Flash intros both provide value, they are also impractical. When you don’t have visitors over, a “grand entrance hall” becomes just a big room that you have to walk through to get somewhere where you’d actually want to spend some time. Similarly, your web visitors are going to be losing time sitting on their hands waiting for your intro to load.

Placing a Value on Web Presence

But the deeper problem with Flash intros is that you get exactly what you pay for. A $2000 Flash intro pretty much looks like a $2000 Flash intro. In my opinion, the #1 search engine in the world got that way from a design. The value of an excellent web presence can be immeasurable. Opting for a fancy hood ornament is just settling.