Flash has definitely established its place in the Web design world. From full on flash landing pages to menus and beyond, Flash offers the ability to provide a rich, engaging, interactive experience for users and designers love using it on websites.

As search engines become more adept at crawling content within flash files, Flash is having a bit of a rennasaince. If you can't afford the few thousand dollars for the latest version of Adobe Creative Suite, there are alternatives, and there's a good one in newly released SWISH miniMax2. Here are a few noteworthy features:

• Includes over 100 preset multimedia effects and over 180 ready-to-use components and vector shapes
• Import images, graphics and sound from all popular formats and export presentations to Flash, GIF animation or image sequence
• Easy Script Assistant for adding simple interactivity to animations and tools to control motion, draw shapes, edit text, and more