Considerations in making Flash Web Sites

[denizengt]

I've recently planned a storyboard which includes the design and interactions etc of my website. I think I've learned a good deal about Flash in the last few months, and this is going to be my first attempt at making a simple, fast, hopefully professional, Flash portfolio site. Probably should have learned Flash much earlier, but I've always been mired in the realm of Raster.

Since you Kirupians probably do this daily, I'm asking for your advice before I get stuck into this proper. What are some things I should avoid, what are some things I should definitely add. Someone mentioned before it's good to have preloaders that occur for each dynamically loaded SWF, but what else do you believe is important?

Thank you for any advice you can give.

[yt]

Be creative, dont settle for mediocre work, and you will be fine.

[zacus]

well this really depends on your layout and design etc

- watch out for image quality, its a small thing that can make the difference betwen a professional looking site and a amature looking site.

- frame rate is another thing to be consious of, to low and it will look choppy, to high and it will be to demanding of low end processors.

- again a small thing but try to keep file sizes small, if things load quickly it really seems to make the site flow, so use alot of vector art, imported from illustrator possibly, this will make it look alot cleaner to


Good Luck!

[denizengt]

Thanks for the tips guys.

I'm not really proficient with vector work, and tend to rely on my more mature bitmap ability, but I'll post what I get up to here, for your constructive criticism.

[cigar]

Try to make it as easily updatable as possible (use XML for example).

Structure everything you do right from the start, and don't start to rush what you're doing as your structure will then get messy (my weakness).

Try to use as much actionscript and as little tweening as possible. For more complex projects, in the long run this will keep things cleaner and more manageable, and enable you to achieve better effects more simply.

:)

[Tommy_S]

I guess, it would be much more convenient to devide the whole site into separate externally-loading .swf's. Don't use rough, aggressive colors in the style "Nuclear summer". If you use pixel fonts/objects, make sure they have the whole number for the position, for ex., 20 but not 20.4. Yup, usin' XML would be much easy, if you're gonna update the site (mostly, some content) constantly. Never use bad quality images. Use very help feature in PS as "Save for Web", but don't save images with the quality less that 50-60. That's it. =)

Have a great day.

[denizengt]

I think what I'll do first is try making something, site related, but not quite a full site, because I haven't tried building structure using XML, and that's definitely something I need to try out first. So I'll do a website header section first, and build from there methinks. :D

Thanks all, this is really good stuff.

[[uber]]

oh and preloaders are like a major key.... have a nice one at the front end.. and for each external swf.. have a cleaner version.. but still equally banging.... if the preloader is cool.. the user might be more eager to see the site..

[bwh2]

design your content area early on. you don't want to be stuffing content in an area that's too small.

definitely include transitions for your dynamically loaded swfs.