Great Flash Site?!

[preckles]

Check http://www.101mediapro.com and tell me what you think of the site. Thanks =)

[Sceiron]

Honestly, I would suggest making a regular HTML version of the site in addition to your Flash version and let people choose which one to use. With my slow-arse 400 Mhz, your site is painfully slow.

I think it looks good, but an HTML version will be much more effective for some of your potential customers. It will also help get you listed in the search engines, as almost none of the crawlers are privvy to reading flash just yet.

It's my personal belief that Flash is good for some things, such as banner ads and eye candy, but should be avoided for relaying information that is essential to your visitors. If you take a look at our site (www.sceiron.com), or that of Annex Technologies (www.annex.com) you will see what I mean.

Another drawback to having your entire site in Flash is that it becomes inaccessible to people using assistive technology, such as screen readers.

Developing an entire site in Flash might be "cool" or "hip" but you'll find that it's not very practical for most sites.

[Rick Bull]

I totally agree, and to add to that I don't like the way Flash ruins my back/forward navigation.

And as Sceiron said, I don't mean stop using Flash just provide an alternative, and your site is very nice, I esp. like the progress bars that move right and left at the same time

[Nikolai Franke]

i partly agree; as for the site in question, i think the animation doesn't quite justify the use of performance that gives users of 400MHZ-machines a hard time.
however, what do you think of using flash for a complex yet handy navigation (instead of maybe-pretty but useless animations) that would otherwise only be achieved through high level dhtml - which is in many cases much slower than a well-done swf?
i do have a beautiful, if cpu-eating example of such a dhtml, which is www.200ok.de (which i am unfortunately not the developer of); an example of a maybe useful navigation system realized in flash may be www.miniml.com (at least to anybody concerned with concentration on screen : miniml seems to be designed to reduce the visual presence of navigation tools to the minimum while still keeping them to hand).

i am most seriously interested in your opinions; i think this will be pretty much an issue in the year to come.

[Sceiron]

I see Flash for navigation as a useful tool, as long as you supplement it with some kind of navigation for those that use screen readers and the like. Perhaps a link to a full site map in regular HTML, or a series of 1x1 pix transparent gifs with appropriate ALT text for those using screen readers and textual browsers.

[Stefan]

Originally posted by Sceiron
or a series of 1x1 pix transparent gifs with appropriate ALT text for those using screen readers and textual browsers. [/b]

That's a bad idea though, since you might be perfectly capable of seeing images but not flash.
A sitemap would work though.

[Nikolai Franke]

what exactly are screen readers? i guess you don't refer only to bots , for they read the 'text used in the swf' that flash automatically writes into the html (if one allows it to).

[Stefan]

Screen readers are normally software that read text of your screen.
In the case of webpages, it reads what you normally see on the page out loud to the user.

[Charles]

Originally posted by Stefan
Screen readers are normally software that read text of your screen.
In the case of webpages, it reads what you normally see on the page out loud to the user.

That was true of the old screen readers (which were invented by a guy named Jim Thatcher) but not true any more. The name has stuck around but they really are audio browsers. They read the whole document tree. That's why it's important to "[u]se markup and style sheets and do so properly."(http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/#gl-structure-presentation) You should imangine the browser calling out the words "block quotation" whenever a BLOCKQUOTE element appears.

[Nikolai Franke]

sure, proper code writing is a good thing.
once more back to the screen readers . I read:
"A screen reader is software that works together with a speech synthesizer to read aloud everything contained on a computer screen, including icons, menus, text, punctuation, and control buttons. Older versions of screen readers were designed to simply read text on the screen, since they had been developed for text-based operating systems such as DOS or Unix. These older versions sometimes have difficulties with GUI (Graphical User Interfaces) such as Windows, Mac, or graphical webpages. Newer versions read out what is happening on the screen, such as which dialogue boxes are opening on the screen, so that users can use them with GUI."
(from : http://www.iso.gmu.edu/~swidmaye/por...istivetech.htm )

I don't find anything on :
1: how much are these used ( i myself never even heard of such a thing);
2: do i rightly understand that they don't actually 'read out what is happening on the screen', but much rather need a specific markup language, which an swf just doesn't provide?
3: if this is the case, then : does anyone know if macromedia is planning to embed something in their .swf-standard that would allow audio browsers to access these files?

quite specific questions, i know; maybe we'll have to learn high-level dhtml anyway. but then again -
4: can those machines read dhtml and xml ?

[Charles]

Jim Thatcher has some in depth descriptions of the workings of the most popular screen readers in his book Constructing Accessible Web Sites (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...sbn=1904151000) but fortunately we don't need to be experts in the workings of those browsers, we only need to follow the rules that were written by those who are experts in the workings of those browsers. I refer to the HTML 4.01 Specification (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/) and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/). And the Web Accessibility Initiative of the W3C is also full of resources (http://www.w3.org/WAI/).

In a sense the readers do need a specialized mark up language - HTML 4.01, or XHTML 1.0, Strict. The important thing is the use of content mark up instead of presentation mark-up. <p><b>Fee, Fie, Foe, Fum</b></p> to a sighted person using a graphical browser is easily understood as a heading, but not someone using a screen reader who might be 'tabbing' through the headings on the page. <h4>Fee, Fie, Foe, Fum</h4> is clear to all as a heading. The former is an example of presentation mark-up, the latter of content mark-up.

DHTML is inherently inaccessible to screen readers. Think about it. All that stuff moving around the screen doesn't work if you don't have a screen. And mouse overs don't work if you don't use a mouse.

[Sable]

Yes, this is a nice site! I'm a little annoyed at the loading bar that appears between every section but there are some unique ideas displayed here. I like how each section loads from right, to left, and to the bottom but would have preferred some color other than white for the loading page.

I'm storing this in my Favorites for future reference. Thanks for sharing!

[preckles]

thanks for all your ideas i really appreciate it....but honestly i'm not a tech person...so i can't understand most of the things your discussing. but again thanks

just keep on posting your comments and suggestion about 101mediapro.com. thanks again