Flash?

BetsyD

I decided to teach myself flash recently. Bought a book and am playing with it. I was reading over on another (non-technical website) and the general consensus seemed to be that flash is ridiculous and no one should ever use it on a site. (Bandwidth concerns mostly, that its not always completely usable for people without Windows secondly)

So I started wondering about the techie's opinions. Are flash sites a passing fad or are they a nice way to display photos and movies?

Thrax

Flash has a time and a place, and generally its acceptability falls on shoulders of its execution. Some of the most beautiful and engaging sites I've ever seen have been done in flash, and some of the most irritating and terrible sites I've ever seen have been done in flash.

Bandwidth isn't such a huge issue as long as you seamlessly present people the option to continue without it. This will additionally give those people who have flash filtered at work the option to see your site as well.

Flash can be elegant and crude. It's up to the creator.

tmh88

If you want to see a really cool flash site check out www.gorillaz.com and click on the "Enter Kong" button.

It's probably not as interesting to most people unless you check it every couple of weeks. The designers make changes to it a lot. It used to be a "fully functional" studio, now its deteriorated as you can tell.

kryyst

Flash certainly looks pretty but it's often not as functional as a nice clean HTML site. Bandwidth and browser constraints aside Flash can just be a pain in the ass. If you are going to do a Flash site, have the courtesy to do a 'press here for HTML only' link.

BetsyD

I was just planning on prettifying (is that a word?) the family album site (www.droegefamily.com) its fairly barebones html right now and frankly pretty ugly. My user base is well.. not big... just immediate family and a few friends... Is there a pretty way to do an html photo gallary that doesn't require a PhD? because I looked around for ways to have an html photo gallary and every code base I looked at gave me a headache :P They were all cumbersome, and non-elegant... or require javascripting which I dont know.

By redesigning it I am going to pare down the wedding photos to maybe the top 20 :P and then add in other gallaries of non-wedding photos (vacations, holidays).

And no I have no interest in using one of those online album storage facilities... I considered them and would rather design my own site.

kryyst

Well there is a very slick way of doing it using a simple java script that you can use to do a nice pop up style photo gallery. It's called lightbox and it'll create a gallery that looks something like this: www.forgedrpg.com/ootas

You put the script into your header then anytime you want to call up a pick you wrap it in the code and it'll make it pop out. I know you didn't want to use java, but it is really easy if you follow the instructions.