I love animations, and I love creating them, but they can quickly become annoying for a number of reasons, especially on a commercial web site. Most visitors still use dial-up modems to connect to the Internet and they have to wait for your pages to be downloaded to their PC. Animations can take considerable time to download, so unless your target audience is children, who love to see colorful things moving around on the screen, it is best to consider the purpose of the animation and whether it provides an added benefit to your customers.
There are basically two types of animations available on the web today. GIF animations, which are small in image size and are viewable by every standard browser that is currently used, and Flash animations, which require a Flash Player "plug-in" to the browser that must be downloaded from Macromedia (which was purchased by Adobe) and installed by the user.
Flash animations can be seen as splash pages on many sites, but there are several drawbacks that must be weighed before you should consider using them:
No search engine can read the information contained in an animation. Sites that use Flash animations for a home page are basically invisible to the search engines, so customers will never see those websites listed unless there is a duplicate HTML version of the site.
Flash animations can dramatically increase the download time and the chances that a customer will leave before the animation is loaded.
Once a customer has seen the animation, why make them sit through it each time they visit the site? If they have to wait for it to finish every time they visit, or they have to hunt for the "skip intro" link each time, why would they want to come back?
However, here are a few GIF animations shown below that I have created for clients in the past (with the image size shown underneath). The nice thing about GIF animations is that they do not require a lot of bandwidth to download. Only the pixels that change cause an increase in the image size, so static parts or pauses in the animation do not affect the download time. So if you want a sparkle that appears just once in a while, or some other element that changes periodically to draw the viewer's attention, a simple GIF animation can be used for highlights:
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