building your own flash site from scratch

[doctahjones]

i'd wanted a flash site for awhile now, but i was tired of seeing all the same templated flash sites out there. i'd never touched adobe flash cs4 3 days ago. 2 days ago i decided it was time to start messing with it. i applied what i knew about photoshop and watched a few youtube tutorials and these are what i came up with.

i'm not exactly looking for c&c because these are -early- rough drafts, but if you have any good sites for tips and tricks i'm all ears. i'm just really quite pleased with what i've accomplished in the last couple of days and wanted to show off

so, without further delay here's the future of what's coming for my two brands.


Professor Photography Demo Flash

The Lab Photography Demo Flash

[ngoduyviet]

Looks good so far for me. I like sites that are simple, and easy to navigate. Think "google" when you design :)

[staceylking]

Looks great!

I just recently converted the main portions of my website FROM flash to html (still working on tweaking it), largely so phone and iPad surfers could see it. There was a span of a few days maybe a month ago when I had at least ten different people tell me they'd tried to show my site to a friend (on a phone) and couldn't. It was weird--I had no idea that many people spent that much time surfing on their mobile phones.

[The Philos]

New.post = hyperbole (I prefer coding in AS over the thousand languages needed to accomplish the same thing without flash.);

If (New.post = true) {I prefer flash sites
} else {
lies
}

[Redneck]

Haven't you read on the forum that flash is evil and a dying technology?

[Brains]

Flash isn't evil per se, but it IS a dying technology. Not dead, but dying. But that's how things work, and Flash was the king for what, 14 years now? Just like nobody writes anything in COBOL these days, Flash is on the decline towards the same end - or it will evolve.

My hunch is Adobe will take what they've learned and apply it to HTML5 Canvas, and Flash will turn into a tool that allows Flash developers to more easily make the jump. They'll be given the option to render to HTML5 Canvas, and the ActionScript will be replaced with JavaScript. Adobe may even offer some transition tool from AS to JS, since they're not too different in many of the common concepts.

But to get back on track for the thread, it's a nice, simple start. Not too busy with lots of moving widgets that can get distracting (my #2 pet peeve with Flash sites, after loading speed.) FWIW, you could create that identically with HTML5 ;)

[sporkthedork]

Is the second site intended to be viewed only in full screen mode? The reason I ask is because I can't see the the navigation bar when I'm not in full screen. Tried it from a wide screen monitor as well as a standard lcd. That being said, I really like the second site, including the intro, color scheme, borders and nav fonts.

[Coogie]

Even if i knew how to use flash, I don't think I would invest too much time an effort into making my entire site with it. As much as i dislike Apple for being a closed system, they have been pretty good at sniffing out dying technologies (ie. floppy drives and command line centric operating systems). I'm also not sure how Flash affects a site's google rankings but I would think that a standard site designed with CSS would be more friendly to robots.

I do however use flash for our photo galleries. I used to do it with just HTML, but it was a huge pain in the butt to have photoshop generate a gallery and then go back with dreamweaver and apply our website template to it (for some reason i would have to manually apply it to each page since dreamweaver didn't know which area to add the gallery to. If I ever wanted to add or take a picture away from the gallery i would have to go through all that again. Last time I redid our site I used a program called Coffeecup to generate a flash gallery and it was much much easier.

I'll look into other options in a few months when I redo the site again.

[doctahjones]

Originally Posted by ngoduyviet

Looks good so far for me. I like sites that are simple, and easy to navigate. Think "google" when you design :)

thanks! thats what i was going for, super simple

Originally Posted by staceylking

Looks great!

I just recently converted the main portions of my website FROM flash to html (still working on tweaking it), largely so phone and iPad surfers could see it. There was a span of a few days maybe a month ago when I had at least ten different people tell me they'd tried to show my site to a friend (on a phone) and couldn't. It was weird--I had no idea that many people spent that much time surfing on their mobile phones.

thanks. yeah i access my site from my phone sometimes, and i'll actually have a landing page where you can select a boring html version, a flash, or a mobile optimized site

Originally Posted by sporkthedork

Is the second site intended to be viewed only in full screen mode? The reason I ask is because I can't see the the navigation bar when I'm not in full screen. Tried it from a wide screen monitor as well as a standard lcd. That being said, I really like the second site, including the intro, color scheme, borders and nav fonts.

no, but i noticed that too on my girlfriends laptop. her screen is 1024x768, and i thought a nonscaling 800x600 window would work just fine. however she has like 4 tool bars in her firefox and IE browsers so it cuts into the top var bar. so that's why i added the full screen option until i can resize both of them down to 800x500 or so. plus i do like full screen because it takes away any other desktop distractions

Originally Posted by Coogie

I'm also not sure how Flash affects a site's google rankings but I would think that a standard site designed with CSS would be more friendly to robots.

you still need html to embed the flash, so you can put all your meta tags there. additionally the html that calls the flash can have all the words you used on your site, -plus- if you're using a robots file you could do some tweaking and redirect to a micro site that has regular html pages or something like that. i don't see it as being that big of a problem, but i'm also not really worried about my google rankings at this point

[Brains]

I foresee HTML5 being big. There's already a bunch of content popping up - graphing and charting libraries, jQuery support, blah blah blah. Image galleries and editing tools are just around the corner, if some don't already exist.

Heck, once you have Tetris, you're pretty much there
Tetris :: Powered by HTML5

[Flea77]

Hmmm, your landing page doesn't seem to work with the first link you posted, blank page on my iPhone, which of course means I can not see it at home either (64bit browser=no flash).

Other than that, nice starts (I am not a flash only website fan though).

Allan

[PhotoWiz]

I used to be all in flash. Now I don't have any flash at all. Funny how things turn around. Good luck with the programming though, looking good.

[doctahjones]

Originally Posted by Flea77

Hmmm, your landing page doesn't seem to work with the first link you posted, blank page on my iPhone, which of course means I can not see it at home either (64bit browser=no flash).

Other than that, nice starts (I am not a flash only website fan though).

Allan

oh there's no landing page yet.

and i'm not sure what you mean by not being able to see it on a 64 bit browser. i was under the impression that IE and the like ran in a 32bit compatiblity mode. the site was made on a win7 64bit machine, and shows up fine in IE on that same machine.

as it is right now, it should bomb on iphones since they don't support flash.

[Flea77]

Originally Posted by doctahjones

oh there's no landing page yet.

and i'm not sure what you mean by not being able to see it on a 64 bit browser. i was under the impression that IE and the like ran in a 32bit compatiblity mode. the site was made on a win7 64bit machine, and shows up fine in IE on that same machine.

as it is right now, it should bomb on iphones since they don't support flash.

Under Windows 7 if you launch IE and start task manager you will notice "*32" beside IE, it is running in 32bit. On the other hand if you install Firefox 64bit, it runs in full 64bit and Adobe has no 64bit version of flash. So no, neither of your sites are viewable on my 64bit machine (the one I am posting on now).

Allan

[doctahjones]

Originally Posted by Flea77

Under Windows 7 if you launch IE and start task manager you will notice "*32" beside IE, it is running in 32bit. On the other hand if you install Firefox 64bit, it runs in full 64bit and Adobe has no 64bit version of flash. So no, neither of your sites are viewable on my 64bit machine (the one I am posting on now).

Allan

yah i know that the "32" means it's in compability mode (as i noted earlier). i just didn't think anyone actually ran it in 64bit mode.

probably a better question for 'open talk', but is a web browser really that memory/processor intesive that it merits a 64bit installation?

it looks like they're about to release a x64 version for linux, so i'd assume winblows and smacintosh releases are soon to follow.