Granny’s Mettle

Optimizing a website with Flash

In order to fully optimize the website's capacity to attract audiences, Flash has been used to provide highly, interactive and efficient websites by developers and designers. The following are techniques and advice by an expert web developer to produce an efficient and optimized website using Flash:

•Stage 1

The first thing to do is to know your audience. By knowing who your target audience is, you may be able to plan your website thoroughly. Planning for your website includes deciding on the sections, pages and contents; deciding on the dynamics of your content and the frequency of update; and providing an initial sketch of your website on paper. This is a good way to plan your website because you will be able to play with it and figure out a setting that will fit your requirements.

Afterwards, create the website template and review it.

•Stage 2

Map the website template in Flash. "Vectorize" as much as possible. This means that your website should have a bandwidth that is simple and highly efficient. One web designer said that in vectorization "the simpler parts of the website are created using simple Flash graphics tools instead of using the sliced images." This process will bring a difference in movie size of done properly. For example, an image of 30Kb can be reduced to 2 or 3Kb.

Create a common set of reusable graphics in separate movie clips. Reusable graphics may be bullets, lines, and other graphics related to the first two. You could use the same movie clips whenever you need them in your movie. With this, you'll be able to reduce the size of the movie due to Flash' feature of being able to render that particular movie clip as a single entity of the movie library.

•Stage 3

Website Architecture- Design the website to load contents/pages in a dynamic manner. The download speed is very crucial. It doesn't matter if you have the most hi-fi website with the most attractive interface and content. If the time of download is so long that the browser is stuck on "loading…", it definitely will not get clickers to your site.

The trick is to divide the different sections to multiple movies. This will help the initial content of the website to load faster> It will also load other content as the pages are requested.

Runtime Flash Library Objects Sharing- Flash allows users to share the objects across multiple movies at run time. Here's how you can define a movie clip or object as "RunTime Shared Object":

ðØRight click on any object in the library panel. Select Linkage Properties and check on Export for RunTime Sharing.
ðØPut a light "loading" animation at the initialization and in the succeeding movies.

•Stage 4

Keep the content frequently updated in a text or XML file and load it dynamically so that you'll be able to update the contents without re-publishing the swf file. For a more efficient handling of data, use the XML object.

•Stage 5

Export the final version. Just make sure you don't export it to the latest format if you have not utilized any of the latest versions of Flash. This will make it easier to reach audiences without giving them a problem in the absence of the needed version.

Upload and test your website in different browsers and resolutions to check on the colors. Different monitors project different resolutions. So do check on it.

Embed your main movie in a web page and add meta tags and keywords related to your website. These part of the process will play a significant role in getting your website listed on popular search engines.

Finally, submit your website to the different search engines in the internet.

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