Flash design has been a controversial issue among Web designers for a long time. Most designers I have spoke with either love it or hate it. It seems to be there is no in the middle here. Well, for the designers that like flash (one of them being me) things are changing - slowly changing may I add. New products from Macromedia and new search engine technology may be shifting the way to flash. Designers are discovering that it is possible to add Flash to Web pages without sacrificing either accessibility or search engine promotion.

Let me give you some examples of using flash in a way that can compromise your design.

1. Entire site being designed in flash is a definite "NO NO" for the search engines.

2. Using flash navigation systems without having a secondary HTML navigation.

3. Large flash intro pages that have a No “Skip Intro” button.

Keeping design in mind usually what's bad for search engines is bad for actual visitors on your site.