Now, if you've visited Disney, Ford, CNN or many other sites, you'll have seen animated sequences that rival those on CD-ROMs. With the growing prevalence of high-speed Net connections, you might consider putting a multimedia spin on your own site, rocketing it with style into the 21st century. These movies run on popular browsers and platforms. To enjoy them you need Flash Player, a plug-in that comes with new versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer. Flash is suited to the Web because it uses vector-based graphics, as opposed to bitmaps.
Vector images are smaller and more flexible than bitmaps.
Flash also compresses sound files into efficient formats, such as MP3, which don't hog bandwidth or download glacially. But Flash is infinitely more flexible and powerful than any of these techniques. And it's not very difficult to learn. When you install Flash to create multimedia for your site, you'll notice that it looks something like a paint program, with a toolbar containing a pointer, pencil, paintbrush and the like. Then begin assembling your movie.