Flash or not to flash; That is the question.

[Christopher Jetton]

Aloha everyone,

I find myself at a point in a project that I never thought would arrive. Like most of you who sit behind a computer screen for a good portion, or all of the day, you become somewhat introverted. I am glad that you are here so that I may pick the brains of the brightest people here in Hawaii without leaving the security of my office. ;-)

This is a personal project with no connections to the commerce what so ever. The site is about 20 months old, but is already closing in on the 5,000 page mark. I made some CSS changes and republished the whole site the other day, and although I have cable broadband service, it took several hours to ftp the site to the server.

The logical thing to do, was to start a new website, but keep the old one for the sake of memories (this site is about my grandson). I started the new site using Flash. I am not sure if I should continue using Flash, or using the older method of html (or xhtml). What would be your suggestion? I doubt there is a right or wrong answer although there may be one. Your opinions would be very appreciated. If this was a commercial site, then you would have to consider SEO and things like that. This is simply a personal site to share with family. My family is multicultural and multinational, so it is the best median to use in order to reach family in several countries.

Site one: www.jacob.jacjam.com

Site two: www.jacob2.jacjam.com

Mahalo in advance,

Chris

[Daniel Leuck]

If your family members in other countries have broadband connectivity, I'd use this as an opportunity to learn Flash and AS3. As you mentioned, there is no SEO consideration, so you might as well go for some eye candy.

AS3 will also be useful if you decide to get into Flex development.

[Gus Higuera]

Chris,

Check out sites like http://flashden.net/ for already built flash components that can spruce up your site without having to do much coding. There are some very nice photo and video gallery components out there that you can use.

[Laurence A. Lee]

Wow, I'm amazed at your dedication to do 5000 pages of raw HTML and images. :-)

Does your picture gallery need to be self-hosted? From the looks of your site's HTML, it looks like you've used and extended a pre-built Template. There are plenty of viable picture gallery sites out there, such as Flickr.com, that work quite well, and are a lot less work to maintain all your photographs. If you're looking for a "personalized" site, perhaps a Blog site sporting an Image-Gallery module might fit the bill?

Otherwise, if you're comfortable with the current HTML, you can get some more mileage out of the site by doing a few optimizations. For example, the large Stylesheet block at the top of each file (which appears to be reused for your Navigation Bar) can be pulled out into its own file, and replaced with something like <link href="/stylesheets/jacjam-main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> to have it externally referenced from each HTML page.

There are also some AJAX-like actions bound to each Anchor in NavigationBar1 to handle Mouse events; and some painful-looking JavaScript variables to manage the NOF_Menu. You might want to collaborate with a coder with strengths in AJAX to help optimize some of that, or to provide you with better code to accomplish the same task. It looks like the majority of your grief is coming from extending the pre-built Navigation Bar template.

If you're willing to try Flash and you were planning to learn it anyway, by all means go for it -- Flash is a fun platform to learn, and is a building-block to Flex.

[Christopher Jetton]

Daniel, Gus, and Laurence, Thank you for the advice. There is so much to learn and so little time to learn it. I have CS3, but I use Net Objects Fusion for my twenty some odd sites (other than the php based sites). I would bet DreamWeaver is a whole lot better. I looked at some AS3 tutorials as suggested (thanks Daniel). It looks very interesting and will look into it as soon as I can. A couple of years ago I took an HTML class. The class gave me an understanding of html, but I still prefer the code generators. My degree is in international business, but I want to go back for some more computer related classes. When I purchased my first Apple computer everything was done in basic computer language. I fell in love the first time I saw a computer that did not require the use of code (Windows). Flashden looks great and will be a great thing to use even though some understanding of the code would be nice as well. Thank you for that suggestion Gus. Net Objects code lacks a lot to be desired as Laurence pointed out. There are remnants of old code mixed in with the new as I tried to upgrade to look of the website as the grandson aged. I think it would be much better if I had of done everything by hand in Notepad.

Laurence, I have Ajax "turned off" on the Net Ojects software. I think you touched on something that has been causing me grief. My ignorance about Ajax probably caused more time being consumed than it would have just to learn it. I took four years off keeping up with the net related technology and it will be hard to catch up. If only I didn't need to sleep...

Oh, I almost forgot. Since I have so many sites, I like to keep things on my server. It is cheap and cost effective.

Chris

[Brian Russo]

If I was building a site that large I would seriously consider this a good time to migrate to some sort of CMS. I couldn't imagine building/maintaining a site that large manually.

[Daniel Leuck]

Another option for a family site is setting up a private Ning network. You would have the same video and photo sharing capabilities as TechHui, without having to do any coding. You can launch a network in 5 minutes using their wizard.

[Christopher Jetton]

Hi Daniel,

Ning might be a good one if anyone else in the family wants to go through to process of posting. I do have two forum sites that go along with my other sites that are a little different from Ning, but I have full control of the content, etc. http://virtualwaikiki.com/forum/ and http://ctuonews.jacjam.com/forum/. I could make it private with log on only like Ning as well. The forums were built from open source.

BTW, I set up an ecommerce site using open source as well. This was done just to see if a guy like me could do it. I love the back office on this site and wish I could show it to you. The site is not to make sales, but may change it up later if I get some products to put on it. I was amazed at how well the site works. www.shop.serendipityvoyage.com

Chris

Daniel Leuck said:

Another option for a family site is setting up a private Ning network. You would have the same video and photo sharing capabilities as TechHui, without having to do any coding. You can launch a network in 5 minutes using their wizard.

[Kevin Luttrell]

Aloha Chris,

I'm ringing in late to your post but I had a conversation recently regarding the validity of Flash and AS3.
The bottom line, in my opinion, is that it is worth the effort to learn.

Without getting into the minutia of details that bore my wife, friends and clients; I tend to view things as layers rather than one versus another. Use HTML with Flash, XML, PHP, AJAX, etc to accent a project.


The link below is a 100% Flash full screen photo gallery I tossed together in a couple of hours for my daughter's trip to the pumpkin patch (which means it VERY basic and not connected to anything and I didn't make a preloader so be patient as the file loads).

I think you might be able to leverage a similar gallery for your purposes. There's no reason why you can't embed the SWF file with the gallery file into your existing site.

http://www.niteowlgroup.com/cole/pumpkin2009.html

The source files and a video tutorial for the gallery are available here:
http://www.developphp.com/Flash_tutorials/show_tutorial.php?tid=296

Since the photo gallery is Flash, it has interactive interest and calls images and thumbs from a simple XML data source--so the photos reside on the server and don't hog browser bandwidth.
There's no limit to the volume of galleries or photos, you can embed the whole thing into a single HTML page-- I just wanted to get crafty and go full screen.

I noticed you have CS3. Let me know if you're interested, I have a CS3 version of the gallery files.

[Christopher Jetton]

Thank you for the reply Kevin.

I liked your site even though each image was slow to load.

The information provided here has helped me remodel one of my sites, and have started remodeling my other sites. You can check it out at: www.jacjam.com. This seems to be the best for me. My sites are heavy on images and light on text. Google Analytics is showing a 33% increase on the site since remodeled. For some reason, another site that has been left untouched, accept for adding three images, has increased 361% during the month of October. Go figure.

Kevin Luttrell said:

Aloha Chris,

I'm ringing in late to your post but I had a conversation recently regarding the validity of Flash and AS3.
The bottom line, in my opinion, is that it is worth the effort to learn.

Without getting into the minutia of details that bore my wife, friends and clients; I tend to view things as layers rather than one versus another. Use HTML with Flash, XML, PHP, AJAX, etc to accent a project.


The link below is a 100% Flash full screen photo gallery I tossed together in a couple of hours for my daughter's trip to the pumpkin patch (which means it VERY basic and not connected to anything and I didn't make a preloader so be patient as the file loads).

I think you might be able to leverage a similar gallery for your purposes. There's no reason why you can't embed the SWF file with the gallery file into your existing site.

http://www.niteowlgroup.com/cole/pumpkin2009.html

The source files and a video tutorial for the gallery are available here:
http://www.developphp.com/Flash_tutorials/show_tutorial.php?tid=296

Since the photo gallery is Flash, it has interactive interest and calls images and thumbs from a simple XML data source--so the photos reside on the server and don't hog browser bandwidth.
There's no limit to the volume of galleries or photos, you can embed the whole thing into a single HTML page-- I just wanted to get crafty and go full screen.

I noticed you have CS3. Let me know if you're interested, I have a CS3 version of the gallery files.