Your website is a personal reflection of you and your business that you've worked hard to create; so why would you settle for a basic, plain website home page for both old and potential new customers to see? Your old customers might just get bored looking at the same old thing while potential customers might not think much at all about your site, and therefore your business. A Flash intro on your website will keep your customers coming back for more.
There are alternatives to plain, old boring websites that are written in basic HMTL. In case you're not up on your computer terminology, HTML is a computer language used to place pictures, words, basic shapes and colors in certain positions on a page. While HTML works great for text and any pertinent information on your site, it's become somewhat antiquated when it comes to grabbing the attention of visitors. This is where Flash and its animating characteristics come into play.
Basically, there are two types of graphics- Bitmap images and vector graphics. Any scanned, flat image is saved as a Bitmap, like photographs. Any drawing made in a computer is saved as a Vector graphic. Vectors use a series of mathematical equations to create the lines and shapes that ultimately make up a drawing. Flash is vector animation software, originally used to make cartoons for web pages. It will also load much faster than HTML because Flash "caches" the moving cartoons so they don't need to be reloaded every time the site is accessed. It's sort of like "cookies" stored in your computer that enable a site to load faster when visited more than once.
If you're still a bit confused, think about this. Back in the 1970's video games began to make their mark in the world. A large black box was hooked up to your television set (without a remote control). In order to get your system to work, you'd have to flip a switch on the back of the TV, and insert a thin, box-like rectangle into the open slot on your Atari video game system. Games such as Pitfall and Adventure were quite popular, offering graphics that were unsurpassed for the day. As technology progressed, so did the games, game systems and the companies who made them. Today, XBOX 360 and Playstation 2 offer life-like images of your favorite stars who have been lucky enough to have a video game replicating a movie or sports team that they represent. Today's games offer state of the art graphics, just like Atari did in the 1970's. If you compare today's graphics with those of the 70's and HTML to Flash, you'll find some amazing similarities in the way they are looked upon by the masses. Don't be laughed at: get a Flash intro to your site.
