Flash Web Design

I talked yesterday about including flash in web sites and I'm all for it - in moderation. But is there ever a time when a complete flash web design is called for, or at least can be justified?

I suppose that if you aren't in need of search engine traffic finding your site, your users are happy to wait whilst it loads and you need a lot of graphical displays then yes, flash web design is useful.

But what about people without flash, or accessibility. Again, I suppose there's times when these may be overlooked - I can't think of an example, but there's bound to be someone to argue the case. But aside from that you should consider a non flash site alongside the flash site. This means that you are producing twice the work.

In this case, would it not be better to have some of the site as standard HTML and just link into flash elements as required?

That's my reasoning behind one of the sites I'm currently working on - when more material comes through. It needs to look spectacular, but be search engine friendly. So most of the pages are HTML, but the products go to flash web design instead. It's not an e-commerce site, just showing off the products. So this combination works great.

But I'm not convinced there is a reason for building a totally flash web site.