Computer animation is the art of creating motion pictures to be used on web pages. There are various resources and programs available to help build these animations and have become very popular now that broadband, and other high-speed internet services are becoming popular.

The main problem with animation is that without the correct tools, and for larger projects, file sizes of web sites can be very large and require more high-specification computers to run the software, or web page effectively. When creating this sort of web site it is important to understand the customer base and whether they are likely to have the necessary resources to display a web site or animation correctly.

The other major problem with animation is that in a lot of cases the customer, or person viewing the animation may well need a certain program installed on their computer that can "render" the animation. Such programs are now free as animation is widely used on the web, but many people would not bother downloading the software just to view a specific site.

The most widely used program for creating such sites is called Macromedia Flash, and exports web pages as flash (.fla) files that most browsers can render as long as the customer has a flash player installed on their computer. The flash player is a free piece of software that automatically detects and plays flash files from the Internet,, or locally on a persons computer.

Flash is an extremely useful program because of its diversity when creating animation for websites. The newest version contains all of the tools required to build very complex web sites solely as animations. There is also a scripting language called Actionscript that flash uses to perform certain tasks such as random movement, mathematical functions and adding things like links to buttons and text.

Flash also has the function to export movies as "swiff" (.swf) files which is a very compressed version of the flash file. All of the code, images and animations are compressed into one interactive "video" that can be placed on a web page, giving people viewing the page the chance to interact with the site. Because flash is so diverse there is little that can't be done with it, from creating simple mouse cursor effects to building games and "flash movies" (usually cartoon based).

The only thing flash does not deal with is 3D animation. For that you can use such programs as Swift3D that are able to work alongside flash to bring the third dimension to web pages. The only problem with 3D animation is the inability to compress files as much as with 2D animation.