We are working on an upgrade of the DECOPOLIS Tulsa Art Deco Museum website. We have a college student who has volunteered to help us design a new website as part of a marketing class project. We want our new website to have more features and be able to have more, easily accessible and fun content.
One of the little ideas I had was to spice up the new banner that would go along the top of the home page. Would like to have the DECOPOLIS lettering "shimmer" like light playing across a shiny metallic surface, and to have the spotlights slowly play accross the sky. Something to give the first page a little pizazz.
(http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/3884/homepagelogoweb.jpg)
If anyone could help us figure out how to do that, or better yet, would volunteer to do that, or knows of anyone who might. Please let me know, any assistance would be much appreciated.
Btw, we are shooting to get our first museum space downtown sometime next year. Stay tuned :)
You want Flash, but Flash is evul. ;)
Quote from: nathanm on November 08, 2010, 11:20:23 AM
You want Flash, but Flash is evul. ;)
Just say no to FLASH!
Quote from: Smokinokie on November 08, 2010, 11:26:07 AM
Just say no to FLASH!
A simple animated .gif would likely work. Flash ruins the browsing experience for many.
Quote from: patric on November 08, 2010, 11:47:05 AM
A simple animated .gif would likely work. Flash ruins the browsing experience for many.
*cough*cough*iPhone/iPad*cough*cough*
Quote from: Hoss on November 08, 2010, 12:07:41 PM
*cough*cough*iPhone/iPad*cough*cough*
For me that would be a perfect reason to go flash :D
It can be done with HTML5. Flash is on the outs and a GIF that size would have a large filesize and poor image quality.
Quote from: custosnox on November 08, 2010, 12:15:37 PM
For me that would be a perfect reason to go flash :D
I don't even use flash on my laptop anymore. Added 30min to my battery life.
Quote from: sgrizzle on November 08, 2010, 12:17:24 PM
I don't even use flash on my laptop anymore. Added 30min to my battery life.
I just have a vendetta against crapple. Personal thing ya know
Quote from: sgrizzle on November 08, 2010, 12:16:49 PM
It can be done with HTML5. Flash is on the outs and a GIF that size would have a large filesize and poor image quality.
It could be, but then you'd have to play stupid browser detection games. You actually don't need HTML5, but javascript performance is so bad on some older browsers that it would look like crap anyway. You just have to make an animation, save the frames as jpg or whatever, then use javascript to preload the frames and animate them.
Flash, being GPU accelerated on Windows, will generally do a better job of it.
Quote from: nathanm on November 08, 2010, 12:39:44 PM
It could be, but then you'd have to play stupid browser detection games. You actually don't need HTML5, but javascript performance is so bad on some older browsers that it would look like crap anyway. You just have to make an animation, save the frames as jpg or whatever, then use javascript to preload the frames and animate them.
Flash, being GPU accelerated on Windows, will generally do a better job of it.
On those computers with a discreet GPU. most business and value PC's use onboard crap graphics.
Quote from: sgrizzle on November 08, 2010, 12:41:55 PM
On those computers with a discreet GPU. most business and value PC's use onboard crap graphics.
Any reasonably modern computer running Windows will have GPU accelerated Flash. Obviously it works better with a better GPU, but even the relatively crappy Intel "GPUs" have hardware DirectX9/10 functionality. (which one depends on age)
Of course, you're right back to where you started with Flash not being accelerated either on pre-DX9 computers (although it is GPU accelerated on my cellphone..go figure) :P
Quote from: nathanm on November 08, 2010, 12:46:19 PM
Any reasonably modern computer running Windows will have GPU accelerated Flash. Obviously it works better with a better GPU, but even the relatively crappy Intel "GPUs" have hardware DirectX9/10 functionality. (which one depends on age)
Of course, you're right back to where you started with Flash not being accelerated either on pre-DX9 computers (although it is GPU accelerated on my cellphone..go figure) :P
Point we are making here Nate, is that the demographic of those devices that would be adversely affected by it is growing by leaps and bounds every day. I don't worry about content being served to my home pc, but if I'm looking something up while on the go, my iPhone needs to double as a research tool.
And no, I'm NOT buying Android. Know too many people with them who have them crash at least twice daily.
Quote from: Hoss on November 08, 2010, 01:47:28 PM
Point we are making here Nate, is that the demographic of those devices that would be adversely affected by it is growing by leaps and bounds every day. I don't worry about content being served to my home pc, but if I'm looking something up while on the go, my iPhone needs to double as a research tool.
And no, I'm NOT buying Android. Know too many people with them who have them crash at least twice daily.
Small screens suck for browsing regular webpages anyway, and I don't use Android. The battery life blows. IMO, if a cellphone can't run for two days with light to moderate usage, that's unacceptable. If it can't make it through a full day with heavy usage, it's just plain worthless.
Either way, a properly designed website will have no problem serving Flash content to devices that can handle it and static images to devices that can't.
Quote from: nathanm on November 08, 2010, 02:13:25 PM
Either way, a properly designed website will have no problem serving Flash content to devices that can handle it and static images to devices that can't.
that's the key.
Problem is, most aren't...
We are using a website builder from "Coffee Cup". Was inexpensive, looked reliable and easy enough for us novices to use, while allowing us just enough flexibility to create something decent. I think I was told last night by one of the people helping me that HTML would be best. At least that was what he said he could figure out how to use with this program. We just got the program the other day so are still finding our way around it.
Quote from: nathanm on November 08, 2010, 02:13:25 PM
Either way, a properly designed website will have no problem serving Flash content to devices that can handle it and static images to devices that can't.
Do HTML5 and avoid the issue. Youtube is pretty impressive when you force it to run HTML5 instead of flash.
Quote from: sgrizzle on November 08, 2010, 03:00:13 PM
Do HTML5 and avoid the issue. Youtube is pretty impressive when you force it to run HTML5 instead of flash.
I've been using Chrome and IE9b (both of which render HTML5). You have to opt-in to the YouTube HTML5 test though.
It renders all that it can in HTML5. I still see some that are rendered in Flash though. Not sure what the decision-making process is behind that yet.
If you want something that multiple people can collaborate on you might look into Squarespace (http://www.squarespace.com/). I have been really happy using their product with different organizations that I have worked with. As well as having a decent front end they also host the content. It is specifically designed for the blogger but I have found that you can customize it pretty much for anything.
Quote from: sgrizzle on November 08, 2010, 03:00:13 PM
Do HTML5 and avoid the issue. Youtube is pretty impressive when you force it to run HTML5 instead of flash.
If you'd rather lock out people using older browsers, that's a fine idea. What's best for any particular site depends entirely on the intended audience.
Quote from: nathanm on November 08, 2010, 05:06:39 PM
If you'd rather lock out people using older browsers, that's a fine idea. What's best for any particular site depends entirely on the intended audience.
Like someone wisely mentioned, a smart designer would have it display basic images if the browsers don't support it. Considering Chrome, Safari, Firefox and IE9 all support it, it's not a bad way to go.
I would also second the squarespace recommendation. You can start simple and change to complicated if you want with the same package.