Any Advice on Flash site building please

[AndyD]

HI All,

I really like the look of a site and wondered if anyone could comment on how it would be built? I believe it is in Flash but can this type of site be built in other software which isn't quite so much of a learning curve? The site is at this location.

Cheers
Andy

[jyoung]

Yes, it is flash site. And a lot of what the site is doing requires software to create swf files. Some things could be done maybe with an animated gif (the text moving in etc). Javascript and DHTML could be used to make nice menu buttons (or you could even use CSS to make some nice ones too).

There is a lot of discussion about websites being created entirely in flash. They do look neat, however sites that are done only in flash usually don't fair well in search engines. As a matter of fact, I googled "Bruce Car Sales" and didn't see that site in the first few pages of results.

Extreme Pro could do the swf files. Hope this helps.

[AndyD]

HI Joe,

Thanks for the info. I did a google and it was the first site listed....mmmm curious that.
I have been asked to do a site for a friend's beauty parlor and thought incorporating some Flash would be a nice little addition to the site. But not exactly sure where it would fit at the moment, rather than having a full blown Flash site....

Cheers
Andy

[jyoung]

Regarding the google search: If I left the quotes around the search for Bruce Car Sales that site did indeed come up because of the more specific request. If I leave off the quotes, which I normally do, then that site was not on the first few pages.

Does your friend have an existing site or is this the first one? If they have an existing site, maybe put a link here and ask for suggestions. Or check other beauty parlor sites. Maybe that will help find a fit. Hope it goes well.

[AndyD]

HI Joe,
I had a working draft at the site but this has now been assigned to the bin and a temporary holding page is at this page. Making it a bit more animated is my next objective.

Andy

[Albacore]

The Home page is really only a splash page made in Flash while all the other pages a bit of a mixture with Flash movies used for navigation and normal html running inside an I frame all done by dreamweaver. This method of using flash makes good sense as it allows the pages to be visited by all the search engines and referenced easily.

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Joe,

however sites that are done only in flash usually don't fair well in search engines

That's resonably true, but there are a lot of things you can do to work around this. I create all my sites in Flash but the index.htm page is always written in html for search engine optomisation.

The majority of sites only require the home page to be indexed by SE's. SE's seem to weigh heavily on the "description" text. If you get the correct text within this tag the ranking becomes good. Links are also another ranking system used by SE's, but these aren't so easy to manipulate.

Flash also has the "Text used in this site" and "URL's used in this site" function which SE's can use to parse the site. In fact this can be used to "cheat" S/E's by placing text off stage so it's never visible to the visitor but the search engine lists it. Very similar to the old method of having white text on a white background to cheat the old S/E's before the robots got wise to this trick.

Another method I sometimes use is to create a very bland, text only, html site / pages with all the relevant text so that S/E's log the content but place an image stating "This is a text only site ... to view the full site Click Here", which is an image and therefore the S/E's can't read the button text. Meanwhile clicking the button takes the visitor to the relevant flash page.

The biggest problem with Flash sites is one of anchor links. S/E's can't handle Flash anchor links. There are workarounds but not usable in my opinion. Probably a S/E shortcoming rather than a Flash one.

[AndyD]

I don't use Flash, so I wondered whether it is possible to do a similar type of design using Pro or any other software?.... I guess .fla files can't be edited other than using Flash itself.
I was looking at SwishMax which might be able to do something similar, I am told.

Cheers
Andy