Articles in The 'flash' Tag

7 Factors that Affect Mobile Search Rankings

by Garrett Astler

Your site may be mobile-friendly, but how well does it rank in mobile search compared to desktop? Google data tells us more searches take place on mobile than on desktop in 10 countries, including the US and Japan. With so many searches occurring on mobile, it’s important to be aware of the differences between the mobile and desktop search landscape.

A recent study examining top-ranking pages in mobile search has identified important common factors among them. If you’re looking to boost your mobile rankings, this is what you should consider:Read More

Principles of Animation For Flash

by Shawn Escott

In this post I will cover some important animation principles used to give life and interest to Flash animations.

1. Squash and Stretch
The classic example of this principle is a bouncing ball. When a ball bounces on the floor the shape of the ball is “squashed” because of the effect of gravity. To add a feeling of speed to the ball you can “stretch” it out while it is at its fastest key frame.

2. Anticipation
Anticipation is the act of preparing for action. Think of someone winding up for a pitch. To use this principle in Flash, simply drop your object back in the opposite direction for a few frames and add a slight pause, then let the action carry through.

3. Follow Through
Think of “follow through” as if a person just threw a ball and their arm is continuing to swing downward. The momentum of the swing carries the arm forward and down.

4. Easing In and Out
Easing is slowing in or slowing out of a movement. It can add grace and elegance to an animation, making it more believable by creating the illusion of weight and resistance.

5. Exaggeration
To give a larger-than-life feel to your animation, try exaggeration. Scale your objects on your extreme key frames to add punch. Animate some things larger or smaller than they normally would be. Be careful not overdo it or your animation will become overbearing and garish.

Are Flash and SEO good bedfellows?

by Lee Zoumas

Adobe Flash is a popular web development tool that is used to add animation and interactivity to web pages. Flash offers web designers and developers an arsenal of functionality that is seemingly not possible to achieve with standard HTML and JavaScript. However, this added flare does not come without its limitations.

Firstly, Flash requires the installation of a browser plug-in to display its content, but the browsers that support it are mostly limited to personal computers. So a flash heavy website will not display correctly for other devices with web browsers, such as cell phones, PDAs or some of the most popular gaming systems.

Secondly, it is still unknown how well Flash based content gets indexed in search engines. Traditionally, Flash based content was ignored by all search engines. Although Google and Yahoo have announced that they are able to index flash content, the SEO benefits and success have yet to be proven. Some common things we see from our clients are the use of Flash as their primary navigation source. If your primary navigation is contained within a Flash movie, then you need to consider an html based alternative. Probably the best use of Flash, in our opinion, is for rich banner ads, or aesthetic elements that do not rely heavily on important content.

However, if you need to put your content in a Flash movie, there are a few things you can do to help the search engines along. One solution would be to offer alternate content on the page for those users who do not have the Flash plug-in. Another solution involves adding the text content that’s in your Flash movie to an HTML div tag. You can then use a little JavaScript to have both the search engines see the text based content and the end user view the Flash movie as you intended. There are some good articles on the web about how to achieve this and we strongly advise that you implement either solution if you need to build an all Flash website.

Overall, if you are concerned about search engine rankings and you have a content rich website, it is best not to design an all Flash site. If you still want to go down that route, make sure you have an alternative html option, such as those listed above, so search engines will play well with your website. As of right now, it does not appear that you can have an all Flash website without some kind of supplemental solution. Only time will tell if Flash and SEO are truly good bedfellows.