Bad Idea to have a flash navigation?

Is this not a good idea?

[Paintballer32]

hey guys i just joined webmasters and love the site anyways on with my question. Is it a bad idea to use a flash navigation? Nothing else on the website is flash except for the Header which will be the navigation part. If it is not a bad idea i also have another question. In my flash navigation it plays every time someone goes to a different page annoying eh? is there a way to make it only play once (home page) and thats it? i believe it has to do with a cookie not sure how to do this thought.

[MarketingSupport]

Unless you have Google Analytics inside of the flash file, you will not be able to track what your users click (to my understanding). If this doesn't matter to you, then go for it. There are sites that are full flash, so I am sure 1 flash file isn't horrible (unless you want the tracking).

Also, you can have your 1-time-playing flash file on the home page, and make a separate flash file that acts as if it has already been played on the other pages (as far as I know, there is no other way, but I'm sure there is).

[Philosopher]

please please do not put your navigation in Flash!

The search engines do not understand nor index flash well. Google is easily the best at indexing flash, and they still aren't that good at it. They will most likely find your links, but from personal experience I question whether or not the links they find within flash (similar to those they find within javascript) are actually transferred any PageRank.

Yahoo and MSN either don't (last time I did any research) index flash at all or are extremely bad at it meaning if your only navigation is flash, they won't even know about your other pages.

Finally, flash based navigation is simply not very user friendly. By having your navigation in flash you are alienating a percentage of your visitors right from the start.

Bottom line, Flash is a great adjunct to a site, but don't make it a requirement for your site to function properly.