Using a Flash Site...

[[AlmightyPyro]]

I have recently descoverd Macromedia Flash, the oh-too-fun, oh-too-famous program that makes Home Star Runner, and Happy Tree Friends possible. I love it dearly and will home my skills at it to become super awsomely, totaly... some-what good with it. I have already designed a couple of website type things with it and found it relativley easy to do. And then the thouhgt struck me! Could I make a webcomic site with flash? Is it OK to do this? and, Will people slap me with a road cone if I ask these questions on the Forums? Regardless I did it any way, and asked them. Please don't hit me too hard!

[Soap Soaperson]

RPin uses flash. His old site used flash more heavily, but I'm pretty sure you're allowed!

[Melody]

A lot of sites are done with Flash. http://www.eminem.com As for a comic site, I am no expert, but I think you should figure out how to make the comics load only when the user wants them to. I think the default is to load everything in the Flash file at once. I already thought of a way to do it, and I don't even have Flash, so it should be really easy.

[War]

War destroy flash sites like that!
Generally sites incorporating flash are horribly, horribly designed. They have music, music is bad. It's as bad as embedded midis. They use JPGs throughout, JPGs are bad.
Homestarrunner.com is fine because the noises only occur on interaction with the site and the images are all vectorised and compress a lot better. Every time I see a site that takes 5 minutes to load I feel an urge to stab someone in the face.
Only use flash lightly. Only uses sounds on site interaction. And only use vectorised images, do not use JPG images ever.

[Melody]

I agree. Music makes sense with the site of a music artist, but in most other places it is annoying. I would not worry about using JPG's as long as they are small. And for your comics, as I said before, you need to figure out a way to load them on demand, otherwise every comic in your archive will have to be loaded at the beginning, which would take like, a lot of time.

[LAGtheNoggin]

Flash sites make me want to hurt people. A lot.

Even the Homestar Runner site makes my fingers twitch a little. So if you're going to make it flash, plea~~~se make a traditional version for us HTML gestapos. Please?

[War]

We're not gestapos. We're sensible. Flash sites tend to be overly large, ugly and hard to navigate.

[Ghastly]

I've always been tempted to start a new comic title, one where I can really cut loose and focus heavily on the artwork with lots of detail and intense character design and backgrounds. Something that will really let me stretch and grow as an artist and then use voice actors to record the dialogue so that all the artwork isn't covered up with speech balloons. Either that or when you run the mouse over top of the panel the dialogue balloons fade in, and when you move it off the panel they fade out.

I usually don't concentrate too much on backgrounds because I hate covering artwork with speech balloons, so my backgrounds tend to just be gradiants and mood lighting. Flash would be a really great way to get around this.

Of course I'm not very good at vector artwork.

Hyung Sun Kim does great stuff in Flash. We'd see more of it if he was ever able to keep an apartment for more than 2 weeks at a time.

Doing a webtoon would be fun too, but I don't have the patience to do animation.

[FoxFang]

So I'm going to be killed not just by war but everyone when I unvail my website. *will make a non-flash versio now to*

[Al666]

Never hurt me, but then I always add backups and shit if someone hasn't got the plug-in.

[Melody]

I don't. I would, but some stuff just would not work without Flash and it would be way too time-consuming to create two versions.

[FoxFang]

How'd you create the backups if I can ask? some type of script?

[Toxic]

Flash is fun!

I recently added a flash section to my site, and visits have doubled from the same time last year.

[Al666]

How'd you create the backups if I can ask? some type of script?

Yes. I've made a little bit of Javascript that can detect Flash on all major browsers and run a gif or other HTML or what have you if it can't find FLash OR run Javascript. I use it for my news boxes.

[McDuffies]

Dunno, I didn't have such bad experiences with flash sites. True, comps at my college don't have plugins and I'm not allowed to install it, so backups are sensible thing to do.
Just as well as with any site having special needs, like those for large resolutions or with tags that don't work with all browsers...
Oh, yeah: I hate when site has an intro, but there's no "skip intro" option. Specially because those intros are usually very slow zooms or stuff, nothing really animated.

[FoxFang]

Mind sharing that script or is it to hard?

[Melody]

Java tags work like this:

<applet [all the applet info goes here]>[HTML to display if viewer does not have a Java plugin]</applet>

Flash is placed in HTML with <object> or <embed> tags, or both to support most browsers. I am thinking it is possible that they may work in an applet tag-like fashion, which would rule out the need for scripts.

[Friend]

I use flash.
But... it's kinda necessary, doing an animated comic and all.

[Ly]

So I'm going to be killed not just by war but everyone when I unvail my website. *will make a non-flash versio now to*

War will kill everyone eventually.. and some of us more times than others.

And I don't use Flash.. though I do use jpegs *cowers*

[Patch]

Nah..no Flash..much of the functions performed by flash for a website can be done with Javascript or Java but what i like about Flash is the simplicity to animate things and just having one file instead of many scripts and that