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Personally, I'd recommend you go easy on Flash and frames. I get annoyed with sites that are basically one big Flash file, as it really limits things, and more often than not, they are slower than non-Flash sites (both in terms of load times, and response times). An animation or two is fine, particularly if it's for something that's not a critical part of the content, but beyond that, it often becomes counter-productive. An example of something that I find particularly frustrating is the Flash-based scrollable window. This aggravating little construct has a region full of text and/or graphics, with a custom Flash scrollbar at the side. Of course, the mouse scroll wheel doesn't work, the text isn't selectable, and browsers already have working scrolling windows, yet some idiot created these things anyways. Flash animations are likewise annoying to those who cannot view them for whatever reason.
Frame overuse is almost as bad. Dividing a page into two frames is okay if done properly, but more than that is usually a bad idea. Then there's the issue of viewing such pages in a small window or on a small screen. If you've ever tried viewing one of these pages with five or six frames on a PDA, with each frame getting its own set of horizontal and vertical scroll bars because it can't fit on the screen, you'll understand my pain. Remember, the whole idea of making it a web page is to make it as universally accessible as possible. If this weren't true, people would instead be exchanging documents in proprietary formats (not that they don't do this as well, but you get my point).
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And once again, Probability proves itself willing to sneak into a back alley and service Drama as would a copper-piece harlot.
- Vaarsuvius, Order of the Stick
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