5-6 years ago there was the phenomena of "Flashmania" all over the web. Big corporate names, especially in the car industry, were all going for full Flash websites. But where have they all gone ? It looks like most of these companies are now back to the old HTML way of doing things. What happened ? Well it looks like things have just been put into place. HTML : quick end efficient delivery of information Most developers and designers will now agree that if the key objective is to deliver information quickly and effectively to a wide audience then HTML is the way to go. When you are looking for the address of the nearest take-away in your area, you are not really ready to wait for that 5 minute Flash intro to end, you want the information here and now. To an extent you don't even need any graphics at all. You would be perfectly happy with the phone number written in huge ugly bold "Times New Roman" on a white background. If your website is regularly updated with new content that needs to be searchable, copied and pasted, crawlable by the search engines and easily viewable in a standard way then you should use HTML without any remorse. Flash : the multimedia experience Flash should be used wherever the user is ready and happy to experience a multimedia experience. Unlike HTML, Flash is a tool that gives a lot of freedom during the creative process : the layout doesn't need to fit into grids as with tables or CSS, sound can be easily incorporated in a Flash animation without having to worry about browser compatibility and big animations can be streamed so no need to wait for it to have fully downloaded before watching it.