Welcome to the April 2003 issue of the CyberArtisans monthly newsletter!

Our goal is to present information that will be useful to you as a web site owner. If these newsletters are not useful to you, please forward this to a friend who will find it useful. To unsubscribe, follow the directions at the bottom of this email.

Flash

If you go to a website and the first thing you see is the word "Loading" followed by a series of dots, you know you have found a Flash presentation. Many websites use them for their splash page (for those unfamiliar with the term "splash page," see the next section of this newsletter).

Flash is a program by Macromedia that lets a web developer make neat little animations for the web. It's a very ingenious program because it uses a Flash Player that you can download easily even if you have a slow Internet connection. And it makes creating animations much easier than anything else available. Note that I said "easier," not "easy." A good Flash creator is a very skilled (and often expensive) person.

So far so good. But there are some downsides to Flash. For one thing you have to wait while the Flash presentation downloads from the website. With a slow connection, that can take some time and while it's downloading, you can't do much except stare at the word "Loading" (with one except that we'll note below). If your Flash download is long you have to plan on losing some audience to impatience. The size of the download is proportional to the length and complexity (but NOT the value) of the presentation. Sadly, many are nothing more than inane celebrations of the Flash developers skills. This is one reason most Flash presentations have a "Skip" link on them.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, we are not great enthusiasts of Flash for splash pages. It rarely imparts any useful information, it uses up time and bandwidth, and once you've seen it you usually don't want to see it again. Problem is, every time you go to that site you either have to sit through it again or skip past it. Do you really want people being annoyed at your website right from the first page?

Flash has one more big disadvantage -- it's invisible to the search engines. The standard advice for people who want a Flash-based website is to create an entirely separate HTML-based website so that the search engines (and visitors who don't have the Flash player) can see it. Expensive? You bet.

Is Flash good for anything? Absolutely. It's a wonderful tool for putting together animated demonstrations. Admittedly, this is harder (and therefore more expensive) than making little figures dance around your screen, but it has the immense advantage of being useful to the website visitor. If you need to teach someone a procedure that can be illustrated with animation, Flash is a great resource.

Flash is also great for creating marketing images that are integrated into a web page. In this application, a standard HTML web page has a Flash window, so only part of the page is used for the Flash animation. Doing this, however, requires a very good designer, because you want the Flash animation to enhance one part of the message, you want to do it without being annoying, and you want to make the download small. Macromedia has perfected this art. Look at their home page (http://www.macromedia.com). At the time of this writing, the page comes up with a large image of a wall electric socket. After a few seconds a few words come up touting their Data Connection Kit. Then an electrical plug appears, stays there for a few seconds, and then plugs into the wall socket as the words "Plug Into Data" appear along with a link to more information.

There are several notable characteristics of this presentation:

1. It's simple, which means the download is quick
2. It's easy to understand (think about how often you have surfed very late at night...)
3. It runs only once -- you don't have to put up with a #$%$% repeating animation just to read the rest of the page

The best website we've seen that gives you something do while a Flash presentation is loading is the website of the Rosen Centre Hotel in Orlando. For a little fun, go to http://www.rosencentre.com. They load a sunrise image and then a hot-air balloon floats into the picture. You can click on this balloon and drag it around the sky while you wait for the rest of the presentation to load.

So, yes, we will create Flash presentations, but we will recommend that you use it sparingly, with great ingenuity, and be willing to spend some money for a good designer.

Splash Pages

A splash page is just an "atmosphere" page that comes up before the Home page. A good example of how we use a splash page can be found on the Robin Fincke Residential Interiors website http://www.robinfincke.com. Because this is a very visual business, having a page that sets the tone before you enter the site is quite appropriate. Her site has a beautiful photo of a room she designed, along with a very little text and an invitation to see more of the site. You can click on the image, the logo, or the word Enter to enter the rest of the site. And the only way you can get back to that page is by typing in the web address again -- clicking Home brings you to the real Home page. Some sites use a timeout so you are forwarded automatically to the Home page after 5 seconds or so. We decided we wanted to let people absorb this page and click when they were ready.

A slightly different example is on Richard Wood's site http://www.rwoodphotography.com. In this case, the splash page is the Home page, but it is more splash page since there is nothing on it but the words Richard Wood Photography, 3 links, and, of course, a magnificent photograph, which is after all the point of the site, isn't it?

If your business is visual, a splash page makes sense. If not, let your visitors go straight to your Home page. In non-visual businesses, getting the information flowing is more important than setting the tone.

Thanks for joining us this month. See you next month.

Jonathan Spencer
CyberArtisans Web Developers

http://www.cyberartisans.com/
617-965-4110