I need help getting started on my web page
polycounter lvl 18
So I want to put up a web page. Thing is I know next to nothing about what I need to accomplish this task.
Here's what I had in mind...
Try not to stunned by my talent.
My question. Is there a way other than doing the whole thing in flash to have an animated logo that overlaps the main text?
Here's what I had in mind...
Try not to stunned by my talent.
My question. Is there a way other than doing the whole thing in flash to have an animated logo that overlaps the main text?
Replies
Since the goal sounds vaugly complex I vote you Keep It Simple.
Bungie does that, might want to look at the source code.
Read up on html before you jump into flash.
Been to my site have ya?
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Actually, I've seen much worse. I was referring to someone recently who thought he knew everything about anything. The thing that bugs me about Imageready created sites is you get a whole bunch of
http://www.vigville.com/images/3d_18.gif
and
http://www.vigville.com/images/3d_94.gif
When you could have just used a background color, and a 1x1 resized transparent spacer gif. I bet that's a pain to edit without Imageready. I knew a guy, I think he used Fireworks, and all his pages would be hundreds of image slices. Even the text within the body. Took forever to load. It was his business, and he would charge $400 per page. And these small businesses would fall for it.
Another trick: If you happen to have a splash page, take some of the important navigation and title images from your pages, and place them at the bottom of the splash page...but resize them all as 1x1. like .... . When someone enters your site, the images are already loaded.
That said, unless you pick your colours wisely, transparent GIFs often have jaggy edges around the transparent outline, which I think often looks poor.
Have you considered just putting the logo at the top and not worrying about it overlapping text? That'd be a lot easier.
There are many ways to optimize a website, unfortunately, there are a lot of people that don't read-up.
Have you thought about stepping out of 1999, and considered maybe the content of your site is a little more important than the 5 layers of animated gifs and flash menus?
Ely: Can't you just add a style="bottom-padding:130px" (or something like that) to the element you want to add space to?
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Hmmm, I haven't seen that suggested before. I'll have to start using that. I'm trying to get into using CSS files more often. I've had problems in the past where they didn't always load (not only on my site), which makes the site turn to crap. Firefox especially, used to have issues with them. These days though, it's gotten much better support from all browsers.
that'd be easier and more sensible than using a big transparent GIF.
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A 1x1 pixel gif isn't that big really. I need to spend more time learning CSS. I just use it to make editing some aspects of several pages all at once. And those cool colored scrollbars OMG!!!
That's what I used to learn CSS
Thanks for that link Poop.
It looks to me by "overlap" that you just want that image in the circle to come down into the same area as the text, like the bottom half of the circle is sitting on a different background color. That would all be done with image editing, and it would not require any transparent gifs. You would just create the image with the corresponding background colors behind it, then line it up on the page using tables or css.
The only real question is how do you want to animate your image. You really only have a couple of choices, a script that changes the image, an animated gif, or Flash.
Flash is your safest bet of all in my opinion, animated gifs do not work for everyone universally. Some firewalls and internet security programs block them, (like zonealarm for instance, which is pretty popular), and scripting, on top of taking time to learn, can also be a problem for some security/browsers.
1. unless you pretentious, the design should be discarded at this stage.
2. What content do you want to show, and who do you want to show the content to?
3. How easy should it be to find the content? Do you want it to be easy or difficult (here's a clue - make your content easy to find).
4. Do you ever plan to change the design of your site? Do you want to keep a good portion of the content? Here is the quick answers - yes, yes.
5. Design the site around your content. Make it easy to navigate, don't confuse the visitor, make things logical. Use CSS to describe everything.
Here is a CSS TOP SECRET!!!!!111one
Don't call things names like orange_bit, left, heavygreen or redtext. Why not? Those are descriptive of the style and design. STYLE ABSTRACTION IS THE KEY!
Call your css things like image_caption, news_date, newsheader -use the css to describe the content, and not the style you want to present it. That way later, when you decide you want all your newsheaders to change you find the newsheader bit and change it - if you have green bold text and want it to be red and italic, it makes more sense for it to be called newsheader and not heavygreen.
The only real question is how do you want to animate your image.
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And the only real answer is "you don't"
[edit] Had to be said
I don't think a lot of people realize that you can use it strictly to create animated images, and they will load just as fast as a static image if made correctly.
As for whether or not he should do it....that's a whole other issue, I'm just trying to help.
*edit*
If you do dig Flash, I think Eric Jordan is pretty much 'The Man'. 2advanced always rocks.
Nested movie clips alone make Flash worth the trouble
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Don't get me started, I hate-- no-- loathe embedded video.
Anyway, I agree that embedded video is usually evil, but will say that the video functionality in Flash Professional kicks ass - no worrying about whether a client has the right codec, all he needs is the current Flash plugin and you can detect for that prior to site launch.