1. CEO: Doesn’t care too much so long as he see’s results in sales.
2. Marketing: Looks great but now needs to be offset against SEO ambitions.
3. Designer/Developer: Likes the look and use of flash but at the end of the day doesn’t really care either way.

My personal opinion is I think Flash can be used in an integral sense. If it enhances without taking over then that is good. Taking over the whole site is bad SEO and probably bad user experience - although there are some exceptions to user experience in these situations the website barely ranks in search engines.

Weighing it all up, enhance, don’t over take the website with flash. Program your site in such a way that should someone like Wilbur, who doesn’t have flash visit your website, then it will simply load a static image instead. Don’t use it on menu’s. Marketing advert purposes only, I think. Keep the size around the same as the static image and load times will be fine.

re: PDF .. obviously your website is not within the PDF, they are just information downloads or forms. I think something like a product range specs within a downloadable PDF is great .. its a takeaway advert for your website. A good marketing ploy.

PDF: For forms that need printed it is great. For content a user needs to read it is usually a poor excuse for HTML. Large files, plugins needs, poor navigation and depending on format difficulty reading.

Even with well formatted PDF documents that can be difficult to use compared to plain HTML. For example, I recently downloaded an ebook (PDF) it was about 129 pages long. Somewhere about 40 pages in there was a link I click. The link took me further down in the document. Abobe lacks any “back” button so it was difficult to return to my original reading place. I’ve never see a web browser that lack a “back” button.

FLASH:
Again an external program that is clunky and the last time I had it on my computer impossible to very difficult to completely get rid of. More importantly, the navigation within a flash page is clunky compared to the standard browers.

For my movie theather example above I want my entertainment in the movie theather not on my computer trying to find out what movies are on. I don’t want to download software to find out the schedule and have slow loaded poor navigatable pages as well.

It you want to show some type of animate ok. If you want to use Flash for your overall informational presenation (indexed by search engines or not) you will piss off a portion of your users.

They both have their place, but it is for a very small, limited portion of an overall site and only for those specific items they are greared for.

Just because you never use it does not mean that it is not a valid medium to use to sell your product or service and also for Google to index. Just wait until Google starts indexing movies and flash .. then things get really interesting for SEO.

We tend to treat Flash in the same way you are suggesting, too - we only use it when it’s absolutely necessary, and try to persuade clients against needless flashy displays and animations. To-the-point and trustworthy text is so much more valuable!

There are two movie theaters near me. One allows me to view their schedule without Flash. The other doesn’t. You can guess which one gets my business regularly.

A movie schedule can be easily and effectively presented in plain ole html!

Another thing I would avoid is PDF. I would use it ONLY for documents that need to be printed in a specific format. How many times do you download some product literature in a PDF file that is formated to be printed, ie: 2 or 3 columns which is nearly impossible to read effective on your screen? The PDF might be 2 or 3 megabytes or more.. just to present 100K of text in an unreadable format!