Posts Tagged → Web design
Flash: ifs and buts
What is Flash?
Adobe Flash is a powerful creation tool for interactive and interesting website development possibilities.
Flash is used mainly for online browser games, animated banner adverts, video players, interactive showcases and sometimes entire websites.
It allows extremely flexible, dynamic and smooth animation, intricate mouse interaction and logic, audio/music playing in synch with things happening onscreen, video playback and pretty much anything can be programmed using it’s built in ActionScript programming language. It also has potential to create content dynamically using ‘Generator’, although this can be very complex to setup!
However there are some serious issues to consider before you go ahead and use it.
What are the pros and cons?
Pros:
- Can make very engaging sites or components of sites, with animation and sounds.
- Good for keeping the attention of a younger audience or for music artists websites.
- Can create unique experiences unlike any other websites.
- Great for making simple casual games.
Cons:
- Requires a browser plugin, which has various versions available, so users may not have the correct version even if they have Flash installed.
- If they have not got the plugin installed, you lose a bit of control of what happens. It is possible to send them to alternate content, or trigger a page requesting they download the plugin.
- To make the more interactive and interesting sites (i.e. making the most of Flash), development time (and cost) is considerably more than a static site with some clever DHTML tricks and/or other techniques.
- Will not play at all on ANY Apple mobile devices such as iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad. This is a serious consideration as many users are now accessing websites with these devices so you would potentially be cutting a huge chunk of your prospective audience out.
- Not inherently DDA compliant, especially if you have a lot of mouse controlled elements.
- Not all computers can play Flash smoothly, especially true if there is a lot going on within the animation. If written inefficiently, Flash can be a major processor and resource hog, so would not work well on older PC’s.
- Because it CAN do so much, it’s easy to go over the top in terms of what content and ‘snazzy effects’ one implements. Harder to know when to stop or what to do in the first place due to it’s open-canvas nature.
As you can see from those bullets, the ‘cons’ list is a lot bigger! Of course every case and every website is different so you will have to judge whether the negative points are not relevant to your audience and therefore if using Flash is still appropriate for your needs.
Summary
The main situations I would normally recommend using Flash are when designing websites for kids, or when you want to synch sound or music up with visuals. I have never recommended using it “just for the sake of it” as I feel that the downsides outweigh the benefits in most cases.
The big drawback now and going into the future is the fact that Apple have banished it from their mobile devices due to some very valid reasons. This is a huge market and hugely growing percentage of web surfers. For this reason alone I predict that a lot of the bigger sites that still use Flash (for media delivery in particular) will be converting their sites in the next year or so to other ways of delivering this content, such as HTML 5 or QuickTime with embedded mp4 movies, to be compatible with iDevices.
At the same token, for new websites I would now always specify that video not be delivered with Flash. HTML 5 will be a level playing field when it rolls out properly in the next generation of browsers but it’s a good time to think about it now and not paint yourself into a corner if you’re developing a new website.
Logos and Branding: your corporate identity
The image of your company is incredibly vital to the overall success of your business.
I often see clients that put nowhere near enough emphasis on the importance of creating a strong brand when they are starting their business… arguably the most critical and important time on which to focus on it!
It can literally make or break a business, new or established. A strong, clever logo can instantly portray what you are about. It can emphasise your ethos and it can speak to the customer without saying a word. On the flip-side of this, if you get it wrong it can say the WRONG things just as powerfully.
To some degree or another this effect is subconscious and subliminal… people don’t notice that they are being communicated to when they see a logo. Some people are more susceptible to the message than others but generally speaking a universal conclusion can be drawn about the companies image, even if this is not a true reflection of what that company is ACTUALLY like, reinforcing the vital need for creating an appropriate logo design to fit your business.
In essence, the image boils down to a logo and the way you use it; colour schemes, typefaces, presentation, layout – and the consistency of all these elements between all of your marketing material/collateral such as stationery, brochures, website, adverts, reports and emails.
I will soon be adding further posts with more detail and some in-depth hints and tips on how to maximise the impact of how you use the above.
In summary, if you get a solution that is attractive and reinforces your brand, it can really make that final buying decision for the customer and make them choose you over your competitors.
Try all you can to not underestimate the ways in which a well thought out corporate identity can help your business succeed!
Simplicity is the ‘Key’!
Browsing habits change… people change. The trend on the internet is that site visitors are spending less time reading on-screen – they want to get to the informtion they need… and FAST!
Whether your site is an online brochure, an information source, an e-commerce site or a community hub, there is value in keeping things simple.
This “simplicity” can take many forms but in essence it is about information management. This encompasses the site menus and navigation, visual design and layout, and the page ‘tree’ structure in terms of how the pages are organised within the navigation system.
There are a number of relatively new techniques (at least new in the sense that they are now “browser-safe” across the majority of current browsers) which allow more scope in how you achieve this simplicity.
Always look at it from your customers’ point of view. What would you want to see to understand the message? What information do you need most? What do you want poeple to do on the site? What is the “call to action”?
Some suggestions to consider:-
Have LESS pages on the site with with less text and links to downloadable PDF files for more detailed information
- PROS:
- Site will be easier to manage and potentially quicker/cheaper to create.
- Easier for users to navigate and easier to control their experience and make sure they read the information you want them to.
- You can format the deeper information to be easily printable so that they can be read offline in a more relaxed, traditional way.
- Users can print off information relevant to them and create a ‘file’ which can be a great way of them showing the information to other decision making staff in the office and easier for them to come back to for further reading. Also having the papeer on their desk it is likely to stay in their consciousness for longer so that your website won’t be consigned to their browser history and be lost or forgotten!
- Easier for you to plan out the website and manage it’s content both in the initial stages and in future updates.
- CONS:
- PDF files still show up in search engines, but if people land on a PDF page, there will be no navigation back to the rest of the site.
- Less pages on your site means less opportunity to get keywords and optimise each page for search engines. This makes it more important to make the pages you have work well for search engines if getting traffic that way is important to you.
- Users need Acrobat software to view the PDF files. Most people already do have this but potentially not the right versions, thus they would have to download and install extra software.
- Planning what to say and in what detail can be more time consuming, because each element of content is important to get right.
Use advanced DHTML techniques to “hide” certain information and “reveal” it when the user clicks certain prompts
- PROS:
- A nice and modern way of managing page content, not overwhelming the visitor with walls of text, but still having that infomration quickly available within hiodden panels. These can animate to reveal further information in a slick way.
- Easier for users to navigate and access the information quickly because the hidden information is instantly shown rather than loading a separate page.
- If executed well, with thought and planning, creates a nice ‘experience’ for users navingating your site.
- CONS:
- Can be more costly to develop the programming.
- May not work on older browsers, but the content will still be shown so users will not miss out other than the visual integrity.
- May not work with some Content Management Systems, although workarounds are often possible.
Have a clear message within the website and “call to actions” on every page
- PROS:
- Visitors (hopefully) won’t be confused by what you are offering, therefore the message will be more meaningful and memorable.
- The presentation will seem more professional and well planned.
- The focus of the site and the users attention will be more controlled, and if planned well you will get the results you want more efficiently.
- CONS:
- None!
These are strong arguments for keeping things simple on your website. For further advice feel free to contact DesignerMark for assistance.
The importance of ‘Visual Design’ for websites
Whilst researching some products for a client, I bumped into a site that would have been a likely candidate in terms of what they were offering, but the site seemed very old fashioned and I noticed that the ‘copyright’ text in the footer still said ©2008.
Now, they may very well be the perfect company for my clients’ needs but the combination of a tired design (designed to accommodate the now very old 640 x 480 screen resolutions) and the out of date footer left a bad impression, so off I went back to the Google Search Results to choose from one of the other similar looking products in the list!
Then it struck me AGAIN… design is SO important for creating the right (or at least, not the wrong) first impression!
With such a competitive online world, which is only getting more and more competitive with time, it’s vital to not get left behind. Vital to make it all count, and essential to keep your website up to date with both it’s content and look & feel – and also the smaller things like copyright dates!
I will be expanding on these areas in the DesignerMark blog in the near future, with some tips and inside info on the latest practices and technologies now reliably and readily available for websites which will hopefully give you some ideas and pointers for your own website.
