I'm not a web developer, but I recommend to get rid off the flash - not only it prevents smooth surfing but you also can't copy any text from the website (e.g. telephone number), which is extremely annoying.

Drop the Flash, make it more colorful (but keep it consistent) and add more pictures to break up the monotony.

There are many free, open source FLV players out there, and for once, this is actually appropriate use of Flash. The same goes for MP3 players. Just -- and this is important -- don't put the MP3 player on every single page (on one page only), and most certainly don't make it autoplay wherever you put it.

Who ever made that site needs to be punished somehow, with something as evil as using flash for a whole site

I second what X-G said, flash is only valid for things like playing streaming media, unless the whole point is that it is a FLASH game/app/cartoon.

Make good use of CSS. It's amazing to see how many do things like

<font color='RED' name='verdana'>Something that occurs several times in the site</font>

You are in great pain if your boss tells you he wants that text to be blue instead. Happy search and replacing in several files.
Instead, link in a css file and change in one place = done

Certainly will. It's one of my favorite languages

Use divs instead?

funny, that site and logo is designed like some corporate e commerce business, not the kind of thing you would expect for a church.

I particularly enjoyed this little snippit:
{"name":"592318","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/1\/e1f98b1bcff83e6b6b27f67782d11ace.jpg","w":453,"h":159,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/1\/e1f98b1bcff83e6b6b27f67782d11ace"}

Good to see that the guideline "Do the exact opposite of what bamccaig says" is still valid.

Most of the drawbacks have been mentioned, but some deserve emphasis.

Yes, it's very pretty, but at the cost of:
1) Search engine indexing (afaik, most search engines will simply ignore flash). This is a big problem. Especially in commercial projects.

2) Accessibility. As far as people with visual disabilities (people using audio-browsers or people who can't read the text without magnification) are pretty much screwed when it comes to this site.

3) Slow for returning visitors. It takes something like 3-4 seconds before the first page shows - after it has loaded, because of the fancy animations. The sub-pages are faster, but there is still a delay (which bugs me).

4) Can't open links in a new page/tab. This is not liked by power-users (at least i dislike it).

5) Lack of bookmarks, proper links (can't send a certain page to a friend for example) and copy/paste.

I realize that I'm just repeating what people already said, but i like to hear my own voice.

Actually, the page is pretty nice in that way - only 51kb

EDIT: actually, never mind. According to firebug, the total downloaded amount was 500kb, without entering any sub-pages.

Elevation Church. I know what you mean about inner content not being indexed properly, but IMO either Adobe or the search engines should find a way around that (assuming they haven't already).

The hard fact is that people with accessibility issues are pretty much screwed on computers in general, and especially on the Web. Everything came about too rapidly and is changing too rapidly to catch up and provide good accessibility. They're also considered by many to be a relatively small user base in a lot of cases and so accessibility is less of a priority.

Speaking of which, yesterday a coworker was testing some stuff I did and realized that for some reason a dynamic table was breaking in IE7... We eventually traced it to the browser's accessibility Text-Size setting being non-standard (higher or lower than normal/medium). It caused a header row to become disassociated with the table making headers disappear and/or not line up, and some labels inside the rows appear in front or behind the table, not scrolling with it. In IE6 the page worked beautifully and as soon as the IE7 Text Size setting was set to Medium it was fixed again.

"Browsers", or if you prefer, some browsers, aren't much, if any, better for accessibility. In fact, if you wanted to you could code accessibility into your Flash application easy enough. There are also zoom features in Flash which would allow you to manually zoom...

I prefer a single wait of a few seconds to constant waits every time you make a move (which if you make enough moves will outweigh the initial wait).

Listen to you... "power-users"... I think the need for tabbed browsing is a flaw in Web design. Instead of getting to and from the information you're looking for you often need to make a number of random guesses until you find what you're looking for, and sometimes getting back is more difficult than it should be. Well designed Flash applications usually have logical menu structures that work effectively and allow seamless navigation.

Granted, tabbed browsing is useful, but IMO it's less desirable in Flash applications.

Except that they really don't matter anyway... Besides, a few years ago when I was stuck with dial-up (approx. 50 Kbps connection) I still preferred Flash Web sites. It took like 3-5 minutes to load the site, but if it was a well designed and worthwhile site then it was usually worth it. It often meant that after loading the first time (where I was doing other things and not actually waiting) I didn't have to wait any longer for the site.

I used to be a user that waited on dial-up so your imagination must be broken. Generally you do have an idea because an intro/loading screen loads quickly and you get an idea of the quality of Flash you're looking at. You probably also have an idea of what kind of information the site has or you wouldn't be going to it at all.

I'm not saying that Flash is the best in all cases or that it should replace other Web technologies. However, it's a great tool for making flashy, interactive Web sites.

I just don't particularly like how everybody is dissing it.

nnnggh...

Obviously if they already know the name of the church, they wont really need to search for it. If, on the other hand, they need to find a church in a certain location or with certain services or whatnot, this page has no keywords what so ever to help them. And as for indexing a flash file... yeah, good luck with that. It's a LOT harder to get a decent view of visible, non-spam, keywords in a flash-file (it would probably have to be rendered and then OCRed).

You should never, EVER, exclude a group of people. This is even more true when it comes to a church (i guess). And there are good tools for those that need them, the problem is that people tend to ignore the very simple guidelines (follow the XHTML1.0/1 standard, use EM's instead of pixels for example) in favor of flashier graphics etc.

Maybe i worded myself poorly, but i was not refering to the downloading of the flash-page, but rather the extravagant animations people tend to put in them (as in this case).

In a perfect world, tabbed browsing would still be welcome. You may see two or more links that you want to visit from the main page for example.
Also, yes, power-users. The ones that are aware that IE6 is a pathetic excuse for a browser and knows not to push the "press here to disinfect your computer!" pop-ups

Oh, if YOU think so, then everyone else must think so as well. Good to know...