Ideas

Hi, i’m building a site for my high school and i was wondering if u have any ideas comments on it so far…

here’s the link:

http://home.iprimus.com.au/j_hellier/Palm%20Beach%20Currumbin%20SHS.html

at the mmt it is just in testing stages, any pages that are not yet completed will take you back to the main page.

Also, how do you give a loaded swf a preloader?

Thx in advance

Make it so that your links on the top and bottom have a hit target so that you dont have to move your mouse around the text to get to actually press it! But it looks like you have a good basis so far but if this is for school then you might want to incorporate some HTML and graphics into the site because it needs to look more like an information site than a counter-strike clan site if you get my drift, but again this is just a beta stage right?

For your question, yes you can give a loaded .swf a preloader! The easiest way is to put a preloader on the actual movie itself which I would prefer or the second way is by using the _level command which may be a little more sophisticated for non-advance users without a little help.

Oops i forgot to tell u about the button thing, thx dan.

What I meant by HTML and graphics look at this, its something I did when I first got MX when I was bored and my lil cousin told me to make him a site for a game so its not suppose to look professional but look at my borders for an example and of how I made the navigation Flash, the banner, and a radio but for the actual content I used IFRAMES loaded in the middle:

http://www.macromotive.com/ebay/erg/index.htm

thx for that.

Nice site btw.

Just remember that people come to sites to view content, good graphics and flash are a just a bonus and shouldn’t be over used. If www.kirupa.com was 100% flash it would take much longer to find content and view it even though it may look nice. Trust me on this one, I have had clients turn down work long enough because of being to flash oriented and not enough content, organization, and usability!

Good Luck on your site and if you need any help don’t worry about it just holla back at me!

I think the easiest way to use Flash is to integrate it with HTML. Having all your content in HTML pages viewed in iframes or frames makes it much easier to update, and viewers can see the update too.

If you don’t know how to disable the cacheing of your .swf file, repeat viewers won’t see the updated content, which is where HTML comes in. If it doesn’t refresh the comment automatically you can just hit the refresh button and voila, everything is updated (doesn’t work like that with .swf files though :-\ )

And since Dan is right about the content over looks, I think you should use the HTML method of content. School sites have to be updated a lot (I know, I started my schools site from scratch and had to get ALL the info for everything, including extracurricular activities) so it would be easier to have HTML content.

Just a suggestion:)

Ok, thx for that insight. I now have another question, lol. You said that a .swf wont “refresh” like a html but what about the text that i get teh .swf to load (ie. using loadvariables) would this be refreshed or not?

After reading what you said i figured that because the only things that will really be updated [frequently] are Notices, Events & Assignments that i would just get flash to link to these html documents and open them in a pop-up window[s] (as much as i hate pop-up windows).

Thx again - Marcellinus

Actually, unfortunately dynamically loaded text in a .swf will not change when the page is refreshed or revisited.

There is this thread, which I know you know about Marcellinus (you were the last one to post in it as of now)…

http://www.kirupaforum.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4011

which tells you how to have have your dynamic text refresh, but I still think its easier just to use HTML content.

lol how dumb can i get? yuk