Re: FLASH: Site Design in Flash?

[Laura Mollett]

> Tim,

> It would depend entirely on the size of the site.

> In my limited experience I see calling seperate swf's as the best

> solution for having a page load quickly, and still manage to be

> entertaining to the user. But if others have different opinions , I'm

> all ears.

>

> HTH

> -Mark


The biggest consideration is loading sequence. If you know what the user is

going to click next (the site's pretty linear) then it's a fairly simple

matter to make sure that portion is ready to be served when the user is

ready to see it, but if the customer will choose what comes next very

randomly, you have to make sure the whole site is available before any

buttons are clicked, in which case you might as well put it all up as one

movie (since it all has to load that quickly anyway). One thing to remember

is that a movie doesn't load immediately just because a button is pressed -

if it's a large movie it might take some time to load and unless it's

carefully streamed will make the button appear broken (a long wait time

while nothing happens) - so you either need pre-loaders on all the movies,

need them all to stream adequately, or need to have them loaded and "parked"

before the user is going to call them (so they're waiting and the customer

isn't :).


Recently I've discovered another consideration is authoring environment. If

the movie is getting so big my computer doesn't want to handle it well

(memory out crashes, which sometimes means losing the fla file and a lot of

work on my mac) or it's very unwieldy (slow screen redraws because I'm

pretty low on ram and other things of that nature) then I might as well

divide it up into separate movies (sort of like I would scenes) and then

either paste it back together or decide to leave it as separate movies at

the end. Another thing to note is that MSIE 4.5 for the mac is buggy about

levels and loading separate movies might not work on that platform.


hth,

Laura Mollett


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