Does this man look like a young Meat Loaf?

In the latest edition of .NET magazine Raoul and I outline the planning, architectural and technical considerations when developing a Flash site for progressive enhancement and search. Unlike most of my bloviate ramblings, our Flash & SEO article is a concise one page. I was happy seeing the article in print but this emotion was tainted as our Creative Director, Louis, cruelly remarked that I resemble a young meat loaf in my profile picture …

See his article here.

Our aim with the new Skive website was to build a great looking site taking full advantage of the dynamism that is available through Flash, but without any of the common annoyances that can occur in non-HTML sites.

The traditional Flash website

Essentially one big page behind one big preloader. Users cannot navigate directly into an individual page within the site, cannot bookmark or forward links to individual pages, and cannot use the browser’s back and forward buttons.  The worst case scenario here is a user who has navigated around the site for a while, doesn’t realise the history buttons don’t work and clicks the back button, taking them right out of the website entirely and to wherever they were before that.

The Skive website

Skive's new website

The skive site uses SWFAddress, a third party Flash and Javascript library allowing each page to have a unique URL and enabling use of the browser’s back and forward button.  There are several features of the site which allow us to take full advantage of SWFAddress.

To minimise load times, and to remove the need for a preloader at all, the site only ever loads the necessary code for the page currently being viewed. This is made possible by having a separate file for each section, and separate modules for each library of code. There is one main site file which contains the navigation, text rendering engine and file loading logic. Anything else is loaded only when it is needed.

To give a concrete example with numbers, all 3D code (which uses Papervision3D) is compiled into its own library which is loaded when needed. When the user visits the featured section the 3D code is loaded first (70KB), followed by the much smaller featured section file (15KB). If the user then navigates to the work section the 3D library is already loaded and only the very small work section (4KB) needs to be loaded.

Page load times are also reduced by not requiring all images to be preloaded before a page will display, instead (like an HTML page) the page is rendered first, then each image as it is loaded.

Well, it’s been an interesting week to say the least. Although I have physically handed my new business card to only a handful of people it has reached enough to fill Wembly Stadium twice over.

About 6 weeks ago, in my spare time I created an Augmented Reality business card and posted it on my blog and Vimeo. I had a small initial rush of a couple of thousand views and then it quietened down. Standard story.

Then last week things went absolutely mental. By the end of the week I had had 40,000 hits on my blog and 180,000 views of my Video. I was being Tweeted something silly and blogged by such giants as Engadget, Popular Science, Gizmodo, Notcot, The Times and many others.

As a result, several big brands have approached me expressing an interest in working with Skive on Augmented Reality projects. I’ve had parties approach me for interviews, articles, tutorials and to be involved in books and conferences.

It was fascinating to see how interest in this piece of work evolved over several days. There was an absolute digital ripple effect. It seems that Twitter played a huge part in driving the success throughout. It’s great to see, first hand, social media acting as a vehicle for non-commercial work to gain such a huge audience in a small space of time.

So where to from here? I will be continuing to experiment using AR but in addition to investigating it at home I will be doing some more R&D work. So who wants an AR application? Form an orderly queue…

Check out Sean’s piece in the IAB, discussing how it’s now possible for Flash heavy websites to be read and indexed by search engines.

Read full article here