What Can Flash Bring To Your Website?

1. Animation
2. Video
3. Interactivity

Animation

Although recent technologies, such as AJAX, have been encroaching on Flash’s bread and butter, it remains the premiere way to include lightweight animation on a web page. Flash’s animation abilities go well beyond what is capable with movies embedded with video plugins and GIFs. The vector-based drawing tools of Flash allow content creators to design really great media, and to publish even long movies online with a small file size. Also, consider Flash’s ability to monitor its own loading progress — something that Javascript can’t do. And remember, Flash has a greater install base than any video plugin, so you can’t beat its compatibility either.

Video

Flash offers a lot of great possibilities for video that other solutions don’t. First and foremost is compatibility. Flash video works in nearly every browser, and is installed on nearly every system. The best part is that you can support all kinds of browsers, devices, and operating systems with one flash video file. Flash’s first video format wasn’t great, but Flash 8 has much improved video quality at smaller file sizes. Adobe has promised to bring the excellent AVC (H.264) format to Flash 9 very soon. This will hopefully enable reuse of video files between Flash and standards-based players such as QuickTime 7. But Flash’s advantages go beyond playback ubiquity.

With Flash, video, animation, interactivity, and connectivity can all be joined into one multimedia presentation. Consider premium ad banners that combine low-bitrate video with crisp vector overlays. This is a great way to combine video with legible text or corporate logos at a very small size and with very high quality graphics. Then, once you’ve captured the browser’s attention, you can mix in interactivity to provide a link, form, or even a game.

Interactivity

By far, the most appealing aspect of putting Flash in your site is bringing rich interactivity with extremely high reliability. I like to think of Flash as a sandbox within which a developer is free to write code without worrying about browser compatibilities. Indeed, Flash has lots of advantages for bringing dynamic content and presentation to your site. Flash’s ability to communicate with server scripts is very robust, it can request XML, plain text and media, and can easily format that data. Flash can then bring in embedded fonts and graphics to create print-style layouts that display consistently. Consider a products listing page where the user could quickly sift through the items by clicking on keywords and have the listings cleverly reorganize themselves with animations in real-time with no loading time.

Bringing it all together

YouTube uses Flash’s video and interactivity features for showing video. It builds on that experience by connecting to other movies and allowing the user to send videos to friends, but the possibilities go well beyond that. Vector animations could be used as lead ins to video segments, providing vital time for loading while still entertaining the user. Imagine a photography studio with cinematic-grade slideshows and desktop-class browsing and filtering capabilities. Flash’s bitmap manipulation and filters make it a great way to enrich media that is otherwise bland. For example, thumbnails might receive drop shadows and rise off the page when a user mouses over them, or they might get a color transformation. Flash can also do smoothing when upscaling images, providing a great way to get just a bit more out of smaller graphics. Whether you’re trying to create a more customized atmosphere, add video or animation to your web page, or provide robust interactivity, Flash has something great to offer.

Is Your Web Site Important To Your Marketing Strategy?

At Image Cog, we agree that your Web site should be a closely integrated component of a larger marketing strategy. However, we boldly profess that your site is by far the most important component of that strategy. I’ll explain why.

When talking about Web sites people, commonly use verbiage like: “visit”, “go to”, and “at”. In effect, they are equating Web sites with actual brick and mortar businesses. Furthermore, we refer to one’s space on the internet as a “domain”, and to a domain as an “internet property” or “internet real estate”. We have “virtual tours”, “online stores”, “Home” and “landing” pages…the list goes on and on. For many businesses, the web site is their business. It is no accident that consumers and businesses equate visiting a Web site with visiting a physical business.

Other pieces of media — TV, Radio, Magazine Ads, etc. — enjoy a bit a separation. We have all had the experience of seeing a bad ad and thought, or actually verbalized, “Who was the ad wizard that came up with that?” A negative impression is never good, but we are willing to cut the business owner a little slack; we are cognizant that the creator of the ad was probably not the actual business owner. Web sites are a different story. With a Web site, a user’s experience is applied directly to their impression of the business in question. This is partially for reasons mentioned above, and partially because users chose to visit the site rather than having them forcibly injected into a particular choice medium. In many cases this will be the visitor’s first impression. Let’s hope it’s a good one.

Like physically walking into your lobby or store, visitors want to feel like they are in the right place. If your Web site is not poised to immediately invoke an experience geared to your business, then the many attempts of calling users to take action, sign up, subscribe, or purchase will not reach them in an effective manner. Why? Because they are already gone, seeking a site that is serious about impressing upon them a memorable and trustworthy experience — a site appropriate for them.

So for believers and skeptics alike, I have some strategic advice useful in planning this all-important piece of your marketing strategy:

1) Have a well conceived site.
Know your USP (unique selling proposal) and study your competition to get ideas on your overall message and positioning. Decide what you want users to do upon reaching your site, whether it be to make contact, buy, register, etc. Plan the content of the site and determine what the most important pieces are. Collect your copy and have it professionally edited or written from scratch. Look for opportunities to engage your users and plan to include the appropriate media (animation, video, virtual tour, etc).

2) Have a well designed site.
When approaching the design strategy, taking into mind presentation and aesthetics are essential aspects of the process. Your business image, conveyed through visuals, should be professional and appropriate for your industry, yet specific to the character of your business. Your site presentation, characterized by content copy, layout, and graphics, should be easy to read and navigate through. What will instinctively follow is having a memorable site that can be easily recalled by its defining design and poised presentation.

3) Have a well developed site.
Any web developer, among many considerations to be sensitive to, should be mindful of the needs of users on both sides of the coin by crafting a site that is stable for cross-browser & cross-platform user interaction. Site-wide functionality without broken or misdirected links should be a certainty. In addition, content should be optimized and/or updated for search engine performance.

4) Have a well maintained site.
This is critically important if you want users to come back, or if you want to stay relevant with search engines. Have a plan to update the site weekly or at least monthly, and plan to have content that requires this. Aside from updating general information, your site should be an outlet for press releases and news. In addition, if you can publish original articles to the site, you absolutely should.

If you happen to have a site in development or in your future plans, ask your Web guy/gal what their plan is on the points above and be certain you are comfortable with the answers you receive. Whether you do it in-house, or contract a firm to do it for you, use a professional. The impression your site makes for your business is simply too important to trust to amateurs.