There is never a good reason to design a web site in Flash. Flash sites are the just pollution strewed alongside the information superhighway. Learn to code standards-compliant web sites with XHTML and CSS.

Contrary to what the name says, Flash does not load as quickly as traditional coding. When you first open the Typophile site cold,you will see the html segments load quickly and then wait for the Flash segments to load and be cached. Sometimes, this seems like forever,sometimes only a few seconds.

Do you want your website to be visible on the iPhone and the iPad?

Short answer, absolutely not.

HTML and CSS support exists in every web browser in common use. Flash support is an aftermarket option.

If the year is 1998: the answer is "maybe"
If the year is 2011: the answer is "Hell no!"

The capabilities of HTML5 and CSS3 are absolutely amazing, and will only get better. Build your website on this foundation.

Flash used to be an industry standard and I would have to agree with the other posters that you may want to skip a website created entirely in flash.

Personally, I class Flash with four-colour glossies, glitzy ads and multimedia pretensions. Mind, the Flash videos "Internet Killed The Video Star" and "All Your Base..." were and are favourites of mine.

Thansk for you all for the reply.

www.ourtype.be

I am one of the few here who is a fan of Flash. However, I consider Flash to be a tool that should only be used when you need to do something that cannot be done as well with HTML/CSS. Lately that range of things is growing smaller and smaller.

But in any case, you should never build an entire site in Flash.

Flash is good for very highly animated/interactive applications. Videogames mostly, but it can also be good for "closed" web applications where content portability and accessibility is not an issue (eg. the Adobe Kuler application (http://kuler.adobe.com) that helps creating color scheme that you can export as photoshop color files).

Generally is best to avoid it unless you need to do something the native web technologies (html, css, javascript) really can't do.

A non-flash website is usable on apple iOS devices that don't support flash at all. Other mobile OS (like Android) support Flash, but not in a very good way, they often have issue of performance and various bugs, so also when the mobile system support flash, it is often better to avoid it. Also, on macs, flash is supported but its performances are not stellar, it sucks lot of resources and is buggy as well.