To some this is great news – who needs those annoying Flash Ads anyway? But to others, who recognise that when used well, for the right reasons, Flash well and truly has it’s place. I see the benefits of using Flash as:

• Excellent for presentation of high quality media, like photos and video.
• The best tool for creating highly interactive visually rich web applications. I’m thinking of things like Pandora or Prezi.
• Seamless browser navigating experience, with a slick user-interface, without the complexity and cost of developing an AJAX/JavaScript heavy HTML web site.
• Availability of a lot of do it yourself web templates, that can be customised simply by editing a series of XML files
• Excellent for presenting music, as the music keeps playing while the viewer is free to navigate all your content. (a bit difficult in HTML as you need to pop up another window, or use frames – each of which have their own set of issues).

The problems of course are well known, but as I will show are easily solved:

• Bad at SEO
• Not viewable on IPhone and iPad
• Not accessible (eg compliance with s508 in US)

As can be seen from the ad on the right of this page, I have created some Flash site templates that I sell on ActiveDen.net. I also work on a lot of sites that are built in WordPress and other CMS’s that are mostly presented with XHTML and CSS. So I know the pro’s and cons of both web site development environments.

For my Flash web site offerings I have systematically addressed all of the negatives or problems associated with Flash web site templates.

• My templates use SWFAddress and PHP to generate an SEO (Google) friendly version of the site, so the site template is easily indexed by search engines.
• I have just added iPhone specific CSS, so that the PHP generated HTML is viewable to iPhone visitors to the site.
• I plan to do the same as soon as I can get my hands on an iPad.
• The PHP generated HTML is also accessible to users who access the web via a screen reader, targeting a large part of users who require sites to be accessible.

You can view my templates in the web browser and with your iPhone from my stock items demonstration area.

So now you can have a site with all the benefits of Flash; seamless, high quality, on brand presentation, without any of the problems.

For example, In my as2 code I had a recursive method for finding a node.

In as3 this is now so much cleaner:

This makes me happy.

In Actionscript 2 the subclass can access all the variables and methods of the original class. It appears that in ActionScript 3, things are much stricter and only public variables and methods are accessible.

For example, this won’t work:

A.as

package
{
public class A{
private var propertyA:String = "Private Property from the A class";

B.as

package
{
import A;

public function methodB(){
trace("---B.methodB()----");
trace("- propA:"+propertyA);
trace("- propB:"+propertyB);
}
}
}

The compiler error is:
1120: Access of undefined property propertyA.

But if you change the private var propertyA (in A.as) to public var propertyA, then the compiler is error free.

But this blog post isn’t about that – this post is about after. When your site is looking absolutely slick and ready to face the world and it’s launched. Now the really hard work begins.

Keeping a web site going is very, very hard. They’re like small children really, they need constant care and attention. If they are neglected, left at the state they were on that gloriously sunny day when the site was launched pretty soon what once looked shiny and new will look old, dated, tired.

How many sites have you seen that have outdated information, or a big photograph of happy smiling people that must be using some sort of über strong Vaseline because they’ve been holding those smiles for over a year now. Worse still are the obvious quick and dirty updates that creep in 6 months, 1 year, 2 years after launch. A big red sentence yelling out the latest most important info – because the boss wanted something up on the site pronto and no one was sure where to put it.

I think that the reason for this is that web sites once launched begin to be forgotten. Everyone in the organisation that owns the web site has other things to do — their regular jobs. The website has not been integrated into the business, no one has responsibility for it so it doesn’t get maintained.

I’m not suggesting that people in the organisation should be chastised because they didn’t take on the extra job of maintaining the web site. That strategy is doomed to failure.

Instead the web site should from the start be designed to fit in with the existing responsibilities of those in the organisation. Web sites are a tool to communicate with the public and others outside your organisation. You already communicate with these ‘outside stakeholders’ – otherwise the organisation would have failed long ago as no one operates in a bubble.

The web site should be designed so that it is a useful tool to make business communication easier. This way the web site is not neglected — instead it becomes part of the family… a valuable part of the family.

Some examples

• Stop making newsletters in a time consuming DTP package… and sending them out to your mailing list. Instead put that content on the web site as soon as it becomes available. If you still need to do a newsletter to a demographic that aren’t online (eg older people who donate to your charity) then make a newsletter up from the web content you have already published — and mention in the newsletter that this is available online (in fact there is probably more online, for example you could fit 2 or three photos of an event in a newsletter whereas you could have limitless pics online).
• Always put new information (event, product statements, or any announcements) on the web site. Initially as your audience makes the transition to using your web site they will still need to be informed the old way… But! Don’t give them the information using the old method of an email to suppliers, or fax to other departments. Instead the old method of communication should only inform your audience that they can find the latest info on the web site. Train people to use your web site and eventually the old method can be scrapped.
• Can some of your internal communications also be made public? If something isn’t sensitive then let it out into the open — getting members of your own organisation using your own web site as an information source means that you have an army of people who are keeping an eye on the site and keeping it alive…Plus this demonstration of internal activity makes your web site more interesting to the outsider.

So ok I lied, there is still a lot of work to do after your web site is launched – even if you are smart about it and make a web site that integrates well with your existing communications. However over time you will be able to manage the transition and you will have a better, more efficient communication system — and an up to date web site that looks as fresh as the day it was launched.

This response may seem a bit odd as you might think that as a web designer my modus operandi should be to encourage all and sundry to get themselves on the web quick-smart. However I’ve had the not uncommon experience of working on many (,many) projects that have turned out to be premature and badly planned so that when it is possible to do so I tend to urge caution. This is exceedingly important with smaller clients and fledgling ventures, as they don’t usually get a second chance.

So this has led me to start thinking about why people sometimes dive in and build something before they are ready, what is the allure of web design that makes small business owners and entrepreneurs sink a lot of their hard-earned (money and time) into what can unfortunately sometimes turn out to be a flight of fancy?

Here’s a few reasons why I think small business/entrepeneurs love to dive in and get their web site created:

• It’s fun and exciting to create a web site, it is a creative process and their is a real sense of achievement in producing something that you have conceived. Same goes for building anything, their is a sense of satisfaction when it is done.
• It’s a relatively tangible thing that you can throw your energies into, rather than working out the hard questions that you would prefer to avoid in your business plan – those small and troublesome things like where your customers are going to come from. Unlike these difficult questions a web site can be answered – it may not be the right answer but there is still a feeling of progress in coming up with something.
• It’s hard to conceptualise everything on paper. It is a lot easier for people to decide what they want in their website as each part comes to fruition. This is the cause of most last minute changes that all Web Designers are familar with and where we ask ourselves ‘why didn’t they say that they needed a forum earlier?”. The answer is that the client often doesn’t know until they see the virtually complete site.

So, yes you can survive without a web site, but it would be a really bad idea to not at least keep tabs on the internet and involve yourself and your business in the online world at a time and in a way that suits your business strategy. There are countless directories, marketplaces and business oriented social media web sites all of which provide a good interim step of testing out your web identity. I think that only when you have experienced a small bit of web interaction to do with your industry/business, preferably with people who are your likely web audience, only then should you start thinking about your own web site.

Of course this will be a key part of my forthcoming template which, if completed before the end of October, will be my entry into the ActiveDen music template competition.

Today I had another issue while adding a generic tooltip to buttons that in an assortment of sub clips and components – the tooltip needs to know the global _x and _y of the button. I couldn’t work out why it was throwing me seemingly random results until I decided to get down and dirty and effectively trace out the entire localToGlobal calculation – the _x position of each nested MovieClip.

Here’s my code which I though was a fairly nice way of achieving this:


var mc= ttTarg; //ttTarg is the ref to the deeply nested button that is the toolTip target
var arr = new Array();
arr.push(mc._name+":"+mc._x);
while(mc._parent != _root ){
arr.push(mc._name+":"+mc._x);
mc = mc._parent;
}

…and what was my problem I hear you ask? Well this little trace told me that the _x value calculated by localToGlobal was slightly more that the actual acculumulated _x values. In fact it was appeared that the localToGlobal function was counting the _x value of the ttTarg twice. Why? Well I haven’t worked that out yet but in the meantime I can adjust the Math to make this spit out the x values the way I expect it to – I don’t mind things working oddly, as long as they are consistently odd

I have been doing some research over the past few months into making my Flash Templates more SEO friendly. Initially I avoided the SWFAddress solution as this involves editing a .htaccess file on your server to enable rewriting of the URLs (phpmodrewrite) which is not terribly difficult but I’m always after the simplest solution possible.

My attempts to find a workaround that would avoid this server meddling proved unsuccessful. I tried all sorts of things, like putting source into the <noscript> tag which I discovered Google does not read. And putting the content in the <div> that would be replaced by the Flash Object didn’t work either as you would get an ugly glimpse of the basic html site before the Flash Object. Actually that last part is no longer an issue I have moved to SWFObject 2.2 which embeds the SWF before the <body> tag – meaning that the glimpse of HTML content no longer occurs.

In reality though the real problem is that without URL rewriting I would be dumping the entire site contents onto the one page. Not so bad with a small mostly text site, but as my new template is all about phtographs, artworks and other visual images this would mean a very heavy page load.

The new templates are on my site too as I’ll be interested to see how well they get indexed by Google. By linking to them here I’ll be wiring them up to the interweb for the first time. The first is the updated mbudm#001 site, and this is a link directly to one of it’s sub pages. The second is the new as yet unrevealed mbudm#002 Curator’s Gallery template. I’m particularly interested in seeing how Google Image Search handles this site as the deep linking extends all the way down to each individual image, as this link to a nice llama shows.

• I don’t yet have these modules coded. I’m getting there but I want my versions to be as stand-out as possible – which means quite a bit of work.
• I saw a gap in the current site template market at Flash Den for a simplified entry level template

Therefore this blog post is a bit of a guide to existing and potential customers on how to add an external SWF to my template.

Add an external item to the site index

An entry for an external page in the index XML file for the template looks like this:

<page type="external" url="swfs/externalDemo.swf" onresize="onResize" onload="init"
onloadparams="data/externalDemo.xml" title="An external SWF"  />

The attributes that are unique to the external type are these (this is copied from my documentation that comes with the template):

• onresize: The name of the function within your external swf that you want to be called when the size of the space allocated to the page changes. This function should be set up to receive width and height paremeter and it should be located at the root of your swf.
• onload: The name of the function within your external swf that you want to be called when it first loads. The parameter below is passed. This function should be located at the root of your swf.
• onloadparams:The parameter you want to pass to the function specified in the onload attribute

So the example XML node above tells the template that when it loads the external SWF it needs to:

• Call a function in the _root (_level0) of the loaded SWF called “init”, and pass the contents of the onloadparams attribute, “data/externalDemo.xml”.
• Whenever the width or height of the page area changes (eg. if the template is set to a fluid layout and the browser is resized) then the template should call a function called “onResize”, which is also located at _level0 of the external SWF. This function must be set up to receive two parameters, width and height.

Setting the size of the loaded movie and calling the onload function

If the external SWF you are using is another purchased item, you may need to consult it’s documentation or contact the author to find out what function you need to call to resize the SWF or to initialise it. Once you know this, you simply need to add the code to the external SWF. So for example, if you have a gallery and the gallery.FLA is set up like so;

• all the gallery code in one movieclip called “gallery_mc”
• the gallery_mc contains a function to initialise called “init” and this needs to receive the path of an XML file as a parameter
• the gallery_mc contains a function for setting the width and height called “setSize” and expects to receive two parameters, width and height.

Then the code you need to add to the _root of the FLA is:

function onResize(w:Number,h:Number){
    gallery_mc.setSize(w,h);
}

function init(xmlFileName:String){
    gallery_mc.init(xmlFileName:String);
}

Too easy right?

• There are already some great solutions out there (isn’t it always the way), but these are relatively recent – mid 2007 is the earliest mention I could find.
• The most popular solution is the SWFaddress example. However as far as I can tell this relies on the php mod-rewrite being available on your server – which isn’t that hard but is probably beyond the skills of your average DIY website developer/small business owner.
• There is a lot of disparaging of Flash as a tool in some SEO circles (SWFaddress SEO solution, Reaction to Google/Adobe announcement of Flash indexing in Google. A lot of which I can understand, but I think like anyone who is heavily involved in one particular area of technology can tend to be a bit biased to there view.
• I was interested to read a small business liftout in the local rag a couple of weeks ago which contained lots of helpful advice for aspiring smalltime entrepeneurs including quite a lot of info on setting up a website and how important that is nowadays. What really grabbed my attention was an article suggesting that startups should not worry about the design of their site but should put down $5000 for an SEO consultant. Interestingly another article from online version of the same publication give much better DIY advice.

Now I’ve just started building flash site templates that are primarily aimed at this small business entrepeneur/ web development hobbyist, because the one thing I know flash can do really well is separate content from code without requiring any server side setup. I’ve also been though a few years working at Fairfax Digital where SEO is an integral part of all website development – basically a sizeable percentage of traffic to all FD sites (theage.com.au, mycareer.com.au to mention a couple). So I feel like I can see both sides of the Flash vs SEO debate.

I think that expecting cash strapped small time startups to lay out $5000 is plain ridiculous (interestingly the article I read in the paper didn’t mention SEO DIY tools like the Google Keyword Tool – and the online article I linked to above nice and clearly highlights that a good SEO effort can be done by the small business owner – basically because they are more likely to understand their niche and be able to provide relevant and interesting content that should keep Google happy.

So the SEO message for small business is – target a specific bunch of keywords rather than aim for something competitive and generic. Which leads me to think that perhaps my humble Flash SEO effort which essentially plonks the site content into the <noscript> tag could be a perfectly viable solution for DIY website developers. They get the ease of publishing (and the inbuilt nice, professional design that is hard to break) as well as the SEO benefits – because surely if they are targetting a niche, and have attracted inbound links because they have good content then their Flash site should do just as well as an XHTML effort.

It’s not a brilliant solution if you have a Flash site with a lot of content (SWFaddress is probably the best – although there is debate about the problem of people using the wrong type of inbound link – the one with the hash in it). And if you have a seriously large amount of content then I agree that an all Flash site is a really bad idea. But to me it seems clear that your average small time no-budget web developer isn’t after the ultimate solution, they’re just after a solution that is easy quick, works well and looks good.