Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

HEY DO ANYONE KNOW HOW TO DO A QUICK EASY FLASH WEBSITE OR ANY SUGGESTIONS ON WERE I CAN GO TO FIND OUT

Re: FLASH
 

www.flashkit.com

it has a lot fo stuff including menu systems small website templates e.t.c. Hope it helps

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

I would definatly check out the site above. In addition, ultra shock (URL ?) has some nice open source stuff. A hint for the beginning Flash artist, actionscript is a lot like C. Also, depending on your application, you may want to ditch swf files, and upload the actionscript as class files (or so my webmaster says).

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

Someone last year pointed out this site for flash buttons that you can use on your site.
It'll save you a step.

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

Also, since Flash requires a plugin, you may note that designing most of your site in Flash will lead to your site returning massive blanked/errored spaces for those who haven't downloaded the plugin.

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

thus you should make a companion html site for those who don't have the plugin.

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

Alternativly, you could only design portions of your site in FLASH out of respect for your webserver

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

like the intro (with the option to skip) and let the rest be html.

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

There are many things to keep in mind when using Flash, especially if you intend your site to have a professional "feel" and want to have a lot of users.

First, there is no such thing as too little Flash. None is idea, some is useful, too much is garbage. Don't just use technology because you can. Falling into that trap leads to slow, clunky webpages with dynamic "everythings", annoying the user very quickly. Don't use any dynamic technology unless you have a clear reason for doing so, and particularly Flash. Its too easy to make bad pages that way.

A well-place, professional Flash addition greatly improves the effect of a website. An example of such a thing would be fading borders/mastheads, a menu system, and well-done animations. Cybersonics (Team 103, if memory serves me correctly) had an excellent Flash-based webpage. Flash served an auxiliary role in the layout, assisting the main body of the document, which was classic HTML.

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

If you want ot see excellent use of flash check out Cybersonics website.

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

Also, if you use flash for entire pages, don't break the back button. Put each page of information in a seperate flash file (like sites such as HomestarRunner). People are used to how their browser works, and they don't want to have to learn your navigation system.

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

Flash is not one of my favorite inventions. It has its place, but its place is far smaller than what most people think.

Please don't do something crazy and put a billion different flash elements on your page. If you must have a flash link bar, make the entire bar one flash element and not 8 little ones. If you must have a flash intro make sure you have a 'skip intro' button.

Flash just doesn't float well with me. Heck, I don't even like using images when I don't have to. What can you accomplish with a javascript or flash linkbar that you can't do with XHTML that adds more than a cool fading effect or sounds?

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

The best suggestion for flash is not to use it for anything critical. Flash is not handicap accessible making it so anyone who has disabilities can't use it. It is true that Flash is more handicap accessible now than it used to be but it is still a far cry from what it could be. If you are designing for the Website award you need to remember that one of the criteria listed is the ability to be used by everyone, this can include the blind. For those who don't know there are text readers that will read out the text on the page, this is why it is important to use alt tags on images and other things so that these people will know what the images are.
With that said flash can be used for making pages look a little more dynamic and if used right can enhance a site.

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

I AGREE WITH MOST OF THE PEOPLE IN THIS THREAD THAT YOU SHOULDN'T DESIGN YOUR ENTIRE SITE IN FLASH. YOU SHOULD BE USING MAINLY HTML FOR MOST THINGS - I MEAN IF YOU DO AN ANIMATION OR SOMETHING IN FLASH THAT'S COOL, AS IS FLASH VIDEO CONTENT AND THINGS LIKE SCALABLE INMAN FLASH REPLACEMENT FOR FANCY HEADLINES, BUT I SUGGEST YOU LEARN HTML AND CSS FIRST BECAUSE AS COOL AS FLASH IS, IT CAN BE A HUGE PAIN TO BROWSE A COMPLETELY FLASH SITE. CHECK OUT W3SCHOOLS.COM FOR A LOT OF USEFUL RESOURCES ON THAT.

ALSO FIX THAT CAPS LOCK KEY

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

I personally do not like flash.... You can do all of the flash abilities using just HTML and javascript and images, if you would like me to, ill design an html alternative to a flash thing you may want to do...

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

Flash is great, but I would only use it on an intro (with a skip button for the 56k users like me). And the plug-in issue: At school some of our computers (the ones that I use) have Firefox and it is hard to download the plug-in and install it at school so the navbar on our website can't be seen. I added a very small links table into the footer of each of our pages so that we could still access everything without opening up IE.

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

Well if it comes down to Flash vs. some weird DHTML effect for an animation or something I would choose Flash any day, since it's got more cross-browser compatibility for that sort of thing than any JavaScript. It's also very useful for cross-platform video if you happen to have Flash Pro.

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

I personally dislike flash because it has two properties.

1) Its binary
2) Its not built on an open standard

IMO the above two things directly contradict the foundations of the web as we know it (insert scary music as you will). Simply put the idea of the internet is to make it easier to publish and read information. Making it binary and closed source make it sort of difficult to do either of them (unless you have the right software).

Plus, Flash has its place in games... but I have huge problems with all-flash or even mostly Flash websites. Flash makes selecting text and bookmarking a pain. And almost as an added bonus, most webdesigners go crazy when they have that much power and I end up wondering where I am supposed to click on the flashing monkey or rub the goldfish in order to move around on their site.

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

Good web design practices have you designing for and testing with different browsers, plugins and connection speeds. If your pages break for any reason , your visitors will leave in a "flash". :rolleyes:

You can build flash detection into your pages and redirect to a non-flash page for users that don't have or don't want the plugins. Yes, there are people that won't or can't enable plugins either because of security concerns, or slow connections.

Google flash page redirection for ideas.

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

Team 1657 from Isreal has a Javascript popup that comes up as soon as you load their page that allows you to choose whether you would like to view their flash site or their HTML site.
http://hamosad.freeownhost.com/

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

The popup does exactly what you said it would do and the buttons do what they are supposed to. If I can make a suggestion, you could do the same thing with a plain html page with buttons. I would add some team graphics and/or color to the background. When the dialog box displays, I immediately thought I got an error message of some sort. When I read the dialog, I knew what to do, but it wasn't immediately apparent.

I like the progress that you are making with the interior content. Lots of good team pictures.

Re: Advice for designing sites with Flash?
 

The majority of humans (including me) run on 56k or less dial-up modems. Your flash site might run just fine when testing it at the lab or from your T1 line at school, but if I come across a flash site that doesnt offer an immediate alternative, I close the page! I haven't even gotten around to installing the latest version of the flash player on one of my computers.

I think that Flash is great for doing animations for fun or instruction (I've seen many flash tutorials, and Homestar Runner is great), but I can't stand it when people make a flash site, or a flash navigation bar on their website.

Face it: It might "look cool" to have your buttons appear in a flash of color and morph around when you click on them, but it is far cooler to me if everything appears instantly. That means, do your entire site in HTML. You can get quite nice visual effect using CSS and careful use of images (another hassle is enormous background images).

When you start designing a Flash-based website, keep in mind that to some of us, viewing your site will be either too difficult to be worth the effort, or downright impossible. Please, provide a non-Flash alternative.

Jonathan