flash player

[martins210CD]

Thinking of having  macromedia flash player for my site,,,would it effect downloading ,, what about memory space occupation.
hanks
could you help me out

[Queen Bee]

I am not sure what you mean by having Macromedia's flash player on your site. Do you plan to incorporate flash animation into your website? For what reason(s) are you using it?

I'm sorry if I don't completely understand your question. An explanation would be appreciated.

[baba]

My suggestion, learn basic web design first... then become very proficient with graphic design... then learn how to work with flash.

Revert to using xml, php, asp, javascript, css, and sql, on unix servers.

>Edit Reason: Unnecessary rudeness and criticism removed.

[diego]

Yes you are right, iam new to flash players, i felt using it would really make my site  more interesting,,,, 

Do know it could occpy space, and inc. download time,,,  thinking of using it only for my index page....

How effective would that have,,  does it take time to master flash.... it looks exciting..

thks or your help

[Queen Bee]

Diego, it's not a good idea to jump into flash, especially if you don't understand the basics. Just because it looks exciting doesn't necessarily mean you need to use it. But to answer your questions:

Do know it could occpy space, and inc. download time

Yes, Flash does occupy space, and requires more download time than regular graphics. Most regular/modem users do not appreciate flash because it takes too long to load.

How effective would that have

What kind of effect do you want? If you're talking about pleasing a wider range of visitors, stick to normal graphics and html.

does it take time to master flash

It takes time to master anything, so yes.

I suggest you visit http://www.macromedia.com/ for all the necessary details on Flash.

[12noon]

You could always get someone to do the flash for you, but it does cost a fortune. Try looking on one of those freelancers websites to see how much people pay.

[johnhask]

To avoid search engine unusable flash code on the page, just put the flash in an external javascript and place in page.

[Hope]

having a flash piece in a page does not cause a problem for search engines. However having an entire flash site is very bad for search engines.

[MyWebTeks]

Hello martins210CD,

I can understand you wanting to put flash on your site as it is well....very flashy! You can do a lot of things with flash from creating simple banners to full blown shopping carts using all kinds of action scripts. It is not however for the beginner webmaster and takes time to master. There are courses in major universities that teach classes devoted flash. It is not an easy program to learn and you need to be pretty efficient in web and graphic design to understand how to use it.

There is however a pretty cool tool called Firestarter that is easy to learn and will create some pretty cool flash effects for your site from CoffeeCup Software where you can download a trial version and create some files and learn some of the basics of creating flash elements.

Flash files can be pretty big files so people that are on a dialup connection don't like them because they take longer to download. One of the benefits to using a piece of flash though is that once the file is downloaded the first time, it does not have to redownload a second time when you go from page to page when that same flash is used in other pages. The flash file will appear to load almost instantaneously after the initial dwonload whether you are on a dialup connection or not. Many flash movies also have a replay function in them so you can watch the movie again. The file does not have to re-dwonlaod and appears to load instantly. This is due to how flash works. Flash is in effect a mini movie that is self contained and is created using time lines and uses vector graphics that are much smaller in file size than jpg, gif, png, or bmp files. If you are including images into a flash that you want to convert into the flash movie, .bmp files are the best file types to use in your movies. They are actually larger files in size comparison to jpg's or gif's but convert much better into flash.

As far as having the flash player on your site, you do not need to put the player on your site unless you want people to be able to download the flash plugin from your site. People do not need for you to have the flash player on your site in most cases since most browsers now days already come with the flash plugin already installed. All that is need for the visitor to your site to view the flash you have on your site is that they have the flash plugin installed on their system. Most flash created nowdays has a little piece of script built in that will direct the visitor to the download link to the flash plugin at Macromedia.com if they do not already have it installed so you really do not need to do anything as far as them having the plugin. If you or anybody else needs the flash plugin you can copy and paste this link on your site Click here for flash plugin

With all that said, I would not recommend that you jump right into flash without first gaining some knowledge of html basics and some of the other programming languages such as php, perl etc... If you really want to see what it is all about though, the link for CoffeeCup's Firestarter is a good place to start. It's a free download but it is only an evaluation version so anything you create with it will have a link in it back to coffeecup.com. The paid version gets rid of this link. It is much easier to use than Macromedia's Flash MX or other flash tools and it will give you an idea of how flash files are made. Keep in mind that files created with Firestarter use a different file type for creating the flash movie than what is used when creating flash with Macromedia's Flash tools. Firestarter creates files with a .fire extension that is then converted to .swf files that is the end result of creating a flash movie. Macromedia uses a .fla file in creating movies which is then converted to .swf files for uploading to your site.

Once you've tried that out and get some experience under your belt with html and such, then you might be ready to get into the big brother of Flash MX from Macromedia or Swish from swishzone.com

This may seem a little long winded but flash is a big subject and entails a lot of learning.

Click here for an example of a flash movie we made with Coffeecup's Firestarter.

Good Luck!