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In order to fully optimize the website's capacity to attract audiences, Flash
has been used to provide highly, interactive and efficient websites by developers
and designers. The following are techniques and advice by an expert web developer
to produce an efficient and optimized website using Flash:
• Stage 1
The first thing to do is to know your audience. By knowing who your target
audience is, you may be able to plan your website thoroughly. Planning for your
website includes deciding on the sections, pages and contents; deciding on the
dynamics of your content and the frequency of update; and providing an initial
sketch of your website on paper. This is a good way to plan your website because
you will be able to play with it and figure out a setting that will fit your
requirements.
Afterwards, create the website template and review it.
• Stage 2
Map the website template in Flash. "Vectorize" as much as possible.
This means that your website should have a bandwidth that is simple and highly
efficient. One web designer said that in vectorization "the simpler parts
of the website are created using simple Flash graphics tools instead of using
the sliced images." This process will bring a difference in movie size
of done properly. For example, an image of 30Kb can be reduced to 2 or 3Kb.
Create a common set of reusable graphics in separate movie clips. Reusable
graphics may be bullets, lines, and other graphics related to the first two.
You could use the same movie clips whenever you need them in your movie. With
this, you'll be able to reduce the size of the movie due to Flash' feature of
being able to render that particular movie clip as a single entity of the movie
library.
• Stage 3
Website Architecture- Design the website to load contents/pages in a dynamic
manner. The download speed is very crucial. It doesn't matter if you have the
most hi-fi website with the most attractive interface and content. If the time
of download is so long that the browser is stuck on "loading…",
it definitely will not get clickers to your site.
The trick is to divide the different sections to multiple movies. This will
help the initial content of the website to load faster> It will also load
other content as the pages are requested.
Runtime Flash Library Objects Sharing- Flash allows users to share the objects
across multiple movies at run time. Here's how you can define a movie clip or
object as "RunTime Shared Object":
?Right click on any object in the library panel. Select Linkage Properties
and check on Export for RunTime Sharing.
?Put a light "loading" animation at the initialization and in the
succeeding movies.
• Stage 4
Keep the content frequently updated in a text or XML file and load it dynamically
so that you'll be able to update the contents without re-publishing the swf
file. For a more efficient handling of data, use the XML object.
• Stage 5
Export the final version. Just make sure you don't export it to the latest
format if you have not utilized any of the latest versions of Flash. This will
make it easier to reach audiences without giving them a problem in the absence
of the needed version.
Upload and test your website in different browsers and resolutions to check
on the colors. Different monitors project different resolutions. So do check
on it.
Embed your main movie in a web page and add meta tags and keywords related
to your website. These part of the process will play a significant role in getting
your website listed on popular search engines.
Finally, submit your website to the different search engines in the internet.
For comments and inquiries about the article visit http://www.ucreative.com
About the Author:
Granny's Mettle is a 30-something, professional web content writer. She has
created various web content on a diverse range of topics, which includes digital
printing topics, medical news, as well as legal issues. Her articles are composed
of reviews, suggestions, tips and more for the printing and designing industry. |
