Unique Web Design Advantages Using Flash

Flash is one of the most practical programs that Macromedia has to put forward. Some people can use it for making very specialized animations and some also use it for web design. As far as web design is concerned, Flash is already replacing Javascript. Whilst some years ago web designers were generating fresh drop-down menus with lines and lines of Javascript, now it has become even easier with Flash.

Flash’s biggest advantage is its great user friendly interface which can resolve the most intricate problems by either using the modules included in the package or the simple programming language. Coupled with Macromedia Fireworks and Dreamweaver, it can take your average professional coder less than a day to create a professional looking web page.

Since Flash can be used in many different areas, from producing movies to writing action scripts, makes it dissimilar to its competitors. To create a Flash web page, you can easily use video files or in-framed animations as well as dynamic content. All you need to do is include some “movie clip” objects, then connect and control these objects by making use of the scripting function of Flash.

If you want to prepare web pages for various contents, Flash can also come in handy. More often, it is used to build pages for multimedia content. Art pages and photo galleries generally consist of Flash animations as well. Music pages are also often enveloped in Flash pages. The bars for navigation are sometimes devised with some dynamic objects found in Flash. On the whole, Flash is becoming the groundwork of dynamic web pages on internet.

Flash is not only used in order to design pages but can also be used for different platforms. It can tolerate for the user to develop content more easily for a wide range of platforms together with mobile phones and PDAs. Two of the most original features are the templates for mobile devices which are built-in as well as the ability to implant sounds such as MIDI ring tones into the content. You can quickly create customized applications that will function on various mobile platforms because of Flash Player’s great ubiquity.

All in all, if you are searching for design solutions for your web site or for PDA, Flash is definitely the right choice with its very professional yet user-friendly features. Flash content is rising, bringing in the colourful breeze that the dynamic web pages are still in want of, thus turning the active scripting into less difficult work for programmers.

 


J.M. Stevens is contributing editor at WebDesignArticles.net. This article may be reproduced provided that its complete content, links and author byline are kept intact and unchanged. No additional links permitted. Hyperlinks and/or URLs must remain both human clickable and search engine spiderable.

Databases In Web Hosting

Many web hosting packages will include one or many databases. If you don’t know what to use them for or how they will benefit your website, you can read on for the answers to these questions. A database will save all your data, but most importantly, allows the data to be more easily accessible. Data can be product information, customer names and addresses, sales records, or even the content that appears on your web pages. By using a database to get that information, you will be able to better serve your visitors and enhance their experience as a customer on your website.

One of the broadest uses of databases on the internet environment is to serve a dynamic form of information as it is asked for. In a large eCommerce site, for instance, the actual product information is kept on a database so that updating the site becomes a simple matter of getting the data changed. Without the use of this system, website managers would have to create more static pages for each product. When dealing with hundreds or thousands of products, this task would become almost unmanageable in an efficient way.

Dynamic pages make use of a template for the site’s static content such as headers, menus and footers. The contents of the database are then inserted into the template by the server software before the page is sent to be seen in a browser. You can place any content from the database anywhere on a dynamic page. This will allow you to set up pages which are more visually appealing and which include text and pictures and also add shopping suggestions such as: ‘Customers who bought this also bought…’’

You can also use your databases for storing and gaining access to customer records. This will allow you to tailor your pages according to what your customer previously bought. Each page could contain a personalized greeting (Welcome back John for example) and when they make another purchase all their personal data including address and credit card number could be taken from the database so they don’t need to fill in the same form yet again.

Mailinglists is yet another use for databases. Many websites send information out to their visitors to remind them about the site and to encourage them to come again. Email addresses can be kept in a database for sending out newsletters and announcements. The newsletters can also be archived in a database so that the visitors can browse or search through previous mailings.

Each database can be separated into tables which are a more complete set of data, so one database can be used for most of your website information by arranging a number of tables. The amount of databases that your site needs will depend on how many applications you are going to be running.

Having a database is one thing, accessing the data is another. There are many ways to get information from a database so that it can be applied more usefully to your website. One of the combinations which is more popular is PHP along with MySQL. PHP can be used in order to create dynamic web pages that pull data from a MySQL database. The language of programming is quite straightforward and can be used to set up interactive forms which are more complex. Other database applications included are MySQL with ASP, MSSQL with ASP, and PostgreSQL with PHP.

 


Martin Redford is contributing editor at WebDesignArticles.net. This article may be reproduced provided that its complete content, links and author byline are kept intact and unchanged. No additional links permitted. Hyperlinks and/or URLs must remain both human clickable and search engine spiderable.