Managing website development can pose some challenges when on the account side of the project, especially when you don’t always have immediate access to creative web developers. The Interactive Web Producer will run into challenges posed by both the creative design team and the web development team throughout the project life cycle, which makes it crucial to understand the project goals and balance with technical feasibility.
Flash and HTML can work together to create the ideal user experience
Early web design concepts are usually hard to follow when thinking in the lines of a pure HTML site. Typically this will cut the design down on functionality and the idea of ‘interactive’ will slowly fall apart. A 3D menu with multiple pieces of functionality on rollover will immediately be shot down and be redesigned into a simple CSS rollover effect to ‘accommodate SEO’.
Keeping in mind that Flash can make external calls opens the door for the design concept to maintain the creative strategy. This allows you to pinpoint which pieces of the design need to be static and which pieces can be flash objects. Below is how this would be done on the technical side:
JavaScript code to allow for page clicks
<script type="text/javascript">
function changePageAbout() {
window.location = "http://mysite.com/about"
};
</script>
ActionScript code to allow the flash navigation clicks to interact with the page. This code would need to be added to the event listener attached to the navigation button ‘myButton’:
myButton.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, myfunction);
function myfunction:void(evt:MouseEvent){
getURL("javascript:changePageAbout();");
};
The application of this solution is simple so it will not become a burden on the project budget or timeline. This could allow for most of the webpage to include flash, while important content, like images, text, footer, and header, to be built in HTML.