Does flash hurt or help?

[Anna stacy]

Originally Posted by torres84

i know it is fun to have this big flash intro with moving words and pix as the first thing a surfer sees on your page. Unfortunately, not everyone has a computer that can handle the load and many people, myself included, will leave a site that has any kind of flash on the first page.

With this in mind, do you think flash really adds to the surfer's/visitor's experience, or is time and code better spent on the actual purpose of the site, with a lean design that loads quickly for most machines, even for people using dial up?

If you want to optimize your web site than you should avoid flash else it surely hurt as search engine crawlers are unable to read flash. So it is always recommended to use less and less flash if you want to appear your site on top positions of search engines.