video VS flash

You may be on your first website. But more likely you’re faced with redesigning a website that isn’t functioning as well as it should. I see 12 vital decisions involved with developing a website, and I want to explain them with you in mind:

You’re the owner or marketing director of a small business and know that getting your website to pull its share of the load is vital for success. But your budget is severely limited!
You’ve just been assigned the task of redoing your company’s website. Congratulations, now you can be blamed if things don’t work well.
You’ve volunteered to take on your church or organization website and make some sense out of it — without offending the person who built it in the first place.
This time around you’ve decided to outsource the job, but you have no idea of how to supervise a design company to make sure it does what you need. Good luck!
I want to help. When I built my first website in 1995 at the very beginning of the commercial Web, I didn’t have a clue how to proceed. In those days there was no one to guide me. I’ve made every mistake you can think of — some more than once, I hate to admit.

Since then I’ve built and assisted with dozens of online stores and hundreds of websites for all kinds of businesses and organizations, from mom and pops to major corporations and international organizations. I don’t design websites for others these days, but I actively develop and maintain my own site.

There are twelve critical places in building a website where you must make the right decision, or you’ll have to repeat this task again and again until you get it right. I won’t be talking about how to write HTML; I want to help you with the mindset, the basic approach. I want to take you by the hand and lead you through the critical decisions. The better you grasp these essential points, the better your website will work and the happier camper you’ll be.

Okay, let’s roll up our sleeves and get started. By the way, why don’t you print out this document and then mark it up with your thoughts and ideas as you read. It’s designed to serve as a worksheet to clarify your thinking and provide direction at various stages of the project. If you decide to outsource the project, you’ll want to share a copy of your marked-up copy of this document with your website designer. Print it out!

1. Determine Your Website’s Chief Purpose
When you begin a website, you must have your main purpose clearly in mind. I say this because it’s easy to have conflicting purposes.

If you’re a website design firm, you may want to show off your high tech goodies with your client’s site as the showpiece.
If you’re an employee stuck with this task, you may want to look good for your bosses and not do anything for which you can be blamed — you’ve got to protect your backside.
If you’re a volunteer, you may just want an excuse to tinker and be praised for it.
If you’re a business owner, you probably care about the bottom line. You’re wondering, How much this will cost? and Will it be worth it in the long run?
Dear friends, recognize your own needs — they’re legitimate. But to build an effective website, you’ve got to look at the business’s or organization’s needs and make those primary. From the organization’s perspective, what must this website do in order to be successful?

Let’s look at some common website purposes. Put an X next to all that apply.

Build your brand. Create an online brochure that will help potential clients, customers, and partners learn about your company and look at it in a favorable light. You’re trying to enhance your brand or organization image. I’ve heard people disparage this kind of website as “brochure-ware.” But this is very legitimate for some kinds of companies, especially local businesses or organizations that aren’t trying to conduct national or international commerce. You want people to know who you are, what you do, where to find you, and how to contact you.
Provide product information to drive local sales of your products and services at dealer locations. Auto sites are a good example. Many manufacturers don’t sell on their sites, but point people to retailers who carry their products.
Sell advertising. A few sites are designed to sell advertising — Yahoo!, Google, and other portal sites are examples. But these days, there’s far too much advertising space and not nearly enough money to fill it all. Internet advertising is improving, but is still under-priced. You may be able to sell a little advertising if you’re a portal site for an industry, or perhaps put some Google AdSense ads on your site. But these aren’t big money-makers. Look at advertising sales as a hopeful bonus, not as a sure thing.
Sell products or services directly over the Internet. You want to conduct e-commerce and sell to a national or international market. You’ll have some kind of ordering system for one or more products, or perhaps an extensive online catalog. You may offer an online service that can be delivered over the Internet or that can be initiated online.
Earn affiliate commissions for sales and leads generated through links on your website. Savvy marketers are building microsites designed to generate search engine traffic for a particular hot product or service. When a visitor clicks on one of their links, he is referred to an e-commerce site, and, if a sale results, the affiliate gets a commission. Perhaps a form on your site generates leads or subscriptions for another company.
Provide customer service and support. Websites are a great place for troubleshooting guides, FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), technical information, etc. You can generate Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) labels. You can provide multiple ways for your customers to contact you (see under Point #9 below).
Save money by means of online efficiencies. Companies have used the Internet to save billions of dollars. Taking orders online with real-time credit card authorization saves paying call center operators and cuts entry errors. Online catalogs save lots in paper, printing, and distribution costs. Online FAQs and knowledge bases cut the number of customer service personnel you need. And I’m just scratching the surface here.
What’s the design decision here? To be clear and focused about your site’s objectives and purposes.

Have you ever considered that your website may be annoying? When it’s comes to website design, knowing what visitors hate most is a must, unless you don’t want them to visit you again.

He is not the first to create what I like to call – “annoying website design”. Many webmasters, especially new webmasters are totally “in love” with their ideas and tend to go overboard with their design in one way or another. It’s nice to have an attractive header, but is it really necessary to assault the visitor’s mind with it? In my opinion, absolutely not!

Webmasters sometimes forget that their website design should send a message to the visitor that should reflect the website topic and not the programmer’s skill level. It should not be blames if you try to create a website that is vivid and appealing to your website，for example a full flash website design. That is a great idea, but remembers, if you rely on search engines a lot, you’d better think twice before you start to create a website with flash and video.

How Come a Website Design Can Be Annoying?
It’s not that hard to be annoying. However, some webmasters are much better than others at annoying their visitors. Check my top 5 list and decide for yourself whether you have been annoying your visitors.

Background music
please don’t play a midi/wav file in the background continuously on every page, unless you are operating an online internet radio station or sell music CDs,

Huge font size
If you are designing a website for people with a disability, you are doing the right thing, but if not then you are shouting. People don’t like it when someone shouts at them.

Small font size
Do you want to be heard? Keep a normal tone, don’t shout but “speak” in a reasonable volume.

Overlapping layers
Layers can be very useful up to the point. But not when they are being used to put an annoying message in the visitor’s face. Don’t try to force your visitor to read your messages. Try persuasion instead of brute force.

Popup windows
Even though popup windows are now blocked by many add on tools, webmasters keep using them. The annoying part of popups is sometimes we actually miss important information because of those anti popup tools. Haven’t you heard the old phrase “if you can’t beat him, join him”? Don’t use pop up windows. Put your important messages in a central place on your website.

Most likely each one of us has our own private top five lists. You probably have many more annoying design cases in mind. Well, you’re right, the list is much longer then that. I just wanted to describe some of the highlights in order to bring this important subject your attention.

Some of you are probably reading those lines and smiling while some others have a feeling a deja-vu. Keep in your mind that as a webmaster the last thing you want to do is put lots of effort into your website and then find out that your visitors hate it. It’s not a matter of taste, but it’s more about being the same polite person we all try to be when we go to a party.

There are downsides to embedding a video into the timeline. It becomes part of your swf, thereby adding to overall file size. Long videos (16000 frames) may not synch audio and video properly. And testing the movie can take time. Finally—and most importantly—quality, especially audio, can suffer.

Embedding a video allows you make it a lot more interactive for your viewers than just clicking play. You can place invisible buttons in a video, tween the buttons so that they track what’s underneath them, and add actions (like coach marks and captions) to them. The result is a video that users can not merely start, stop, or even scrub but can genuinely interact with. Your imagination is the constraining factor.

There is a work around for the downsides of embedding a video. Click here when you’re really ready to create an annotated video and put it on the Web. The instructions that follow work but the quality won’t be as good.

Here’s how to embed a video in the timeline:

Select File>Import>Import Video.

Select Video: Browse to the video you want to import.

Click Continue.

Deployment: Choose your method. For embedding it on the timeline, choose Embed video in SWF and play in timeline. Flash will warn you, but, hey, this is a free country.

Click Continue.

Embedding: Choose the following:

The symbol type how you want the video to be embedded—here “embedded video”;

whether you want the audio track integrated or separate—select Integrated;

if Flash should place an instance on the Stage—enable the checkmark;

if Flash should expand the timeline so that all the frames are displayed;

Whether you want to embed the entire video as is or if you want to edit it first.

The latter option allows you to trim the movie’s duration or to break the movie up into more than one clip. It’s probably easier to do your editing outside of Flash but decide for yourself.

Click Continue.

Encoding: Choose a preset or Click Show Advanced Settings to set the following options:

Encoding Tab
alpha channel (that must be done when you create your movie; here you’re only enabling it—if you aren’t sure what you’re doing, skip this setting)
Frame rate; resizing; video quality; key frame; audio data rate—set it to 192 kbps

Cue Points
Note: I don’t think there’s much advantage in setting cue points in an embedded movie, whose major feature is adding interactivity well beyond just jumping to a specific spot. Moreover, you’ll have to add your own controller anyway. But I could be wrong. If you do opt for this, follow these steps:

In the preview of the video you’re importing, move the play head to where you want the first cue point.

Click the + button on the left side of the screen.

Flash inserts a default name (New Cue Point) and the time where the play head currently is.

In the drop down menu, select Navigation.

Repeat these steps, adding cue points with unique names.
See the Using Cue Points section below.

Crop and Trim:
Crop the the video to change what will be visible by adjusting the horizontal and vertical sliders.
Trim the video so that only a specific duration of it will be encoded and played. Set the Start and End points by moving the triangles under the preview scrubber

Click Continue.

Finish Video Import—-Flash gives you an overview of your settings and what files you have to copy to your web server. Review your settings and go back if you have to. You can also choose to view video help topics after Flash finishes importing.

Click Finish.
Flash starts encoding, reports it progress, and places video on stage.

You’ll have to provide your own controller for an embedded movie; the Flash components (and their skins) won’t work. Click here to add simple Stop and Pause buttons.

Test your movie.

Upload the main swf to your server. Unlike uploading streaming video, the main swf is the only file to worry about.

The Flash 8 Video Encoder
The Video Encoder is a separate application that ships only with Flash Pro. It allows batch encoding of files, which improves your work flow.

This application uses the same compression dialog window as in the previous section.

Before you start to take plunge to build a website, you must have a clear idea of what you want to express, present, and what you want to communicate or even convince your video website. Put it im simple words, you must know what you want to tell your visitors. What do you try to deliver?
Never try to acquire some inspiration from internet, inspiration or creative idea is independent from computer. Computer cannot think and thus it has nothing to do with human mind. No temptation, no distraction. No interruption. Maybe a little bit of sleep might help.
Just like you must plan carefully before you start a business, you’d better perceive what kind of business you want to do and how you can promote it and profit from it. If you cannot put down what you want clearly, you will be doomed to fail since the day you start.
I’ve found it’s best to start from general terms and work my way to the specifics. For example, let’s say I have decided to make an online store of boutique and my audience is young girls. Then what kind of boutiques I would like to sell on my online store. And how can I promote my online store or how can I attract young girls to come to my store? I may add video onto my website to show young girls I with fashion boutique and music would be a plus. Or I might choose to build a flash website.
List down all the problem and write down answer of each question and you become clearer and clearer.
You may also start to consider briefly how you are going to communicate your messages. Think a little bit about graphics, sounds and other multimedia at this point. Staying with the cat example, I might want to include a chart of cat breeds with a picture of each breed, along with a description and favorite food. I may also want to include video or sounds to communicate better. Remember, you are not creating the web site or its contents at this time – you are defining the boundaries.
Remember to always tie back your decisions to your goals and to your audience. Are these things that your audience would want to know? Does all of this information fit in with the site goals and objectives? In other words, if you are creating a web site about cats, you probably do not want to include articles and pictures from your skiing trip – unless, of course, you have a cat that skis.
I’ve found it’s usually good to do this several times over several days. Write down your thoughts and organize them as necessary. Then go home and come back the next day. Repeat the process. Do this as often as necessary until it just feels like it’s done.
When you get everything finished, you will find that the remainder of the web site analysis and design process will go much smoother. And it should – you know what you are trying to communicate. That sure makes it easier to do so.

Adding video to a web site lends credibility which can greatly increase your conversions, and sales – not to mention your number of repeat visitors. Simply put, videos are popular. According to Nielson Online, in just one month (April of 2008) YouTube alone had 74 million unique visitors from across the globe who watched 4 billion video-streams. As it is known to all, YouTube adopts flv format to display the video, so the first step of adding videos to website is to encode video to flash.

If you’ve been straddling the fence about whether or not you should add video content，mainly flash video to your website or blog, I am going to convince you that now is the time to take the plunge.

People just love this medium. For a lot of Internet-surfers, it seems to be one step removed from watching tv, and much more appealing than reading through a long article.

Video is rapidly becoming a required feature for websites, and the tools available today make the process of adding video easy – in fact, depending on your method, you really don’t need to know any of the technical details. It is far from being a complex process.

Here are the three most widely used means of adding a video to a site:

1. Using video scripts – There are several scripts available today that allow you to upload videos. Once uploaded, the scripts will either convert your videos to flash objects to be shown online, or they will act as mini-CMSs allowing the video to play on your site. These scripts come in all price ranges with some being quite affordable.

2. Using Youtube or other video sharing sites – Some people have reservations about using a middleman, but this method is probably the fastest and easiest to implement. First, you create a video and upload it to Youtube. Then, you take your video’s object embedded code from Youtube and place it within the code on your site – simple as that.

3. Using video software – This method provides the most professional look for a websit, in addition to being the one offering the most flexibility and control.

It’s increasingly likely that, in addition to authoring DVD versions of your edited video projects and copying back to tape in the camcorder, you’ll want to configure your movie for sharing with friends and family members over the Internet. With the widespread use of broadband connections, many people are now realizing the benefits of being able to send and receive good quality video clips at a speed that simply wasn’t possible on dial up connections.

Also, more and more people are exchanging short video clips via their cell phones, PlayStation Portables, and iPod Video devices, so why not take full advantage of this exciting new range of distribution options?

All popular video editing and export programs contain utilities designed to enable the easy, hassle-free, conversion of your full screen digital video files to those formats appropriate to sharing over limited bandwidth. Even though your broadband Internet connection might be fast, it still has its restrictions and there’s no way you’ll be able to share your clips unless they’re reduced in window size and file size. That entails compression using similar techniques appropriate to DVD authoring, only with much greater compression rates.

In order to view video files over the Internet, the end user will need to use a software player. If you want to create flash video and upload the flash video for online sharing with more friends, you need to find software to convert video to flash. Common examples of these include Microsoft Windows Media Player, Apple QuickTime, and Real Networks’ Real Player. Other choices include Macromedia Flash and DivX (although the latter is more suited to desktop computer and disk playback). By using the first two, you’ll cover most of the user base, and there are versions for Windows PCs as well as Apple Mac.

Top Flash Components To Create The Ultimate Website
You already have a great website. Why not make it even greater? With the flash components from Flashloaded, you could easily turn your great Flash website into the ultimate Flash website there could ever be.
Flash MX 2004 components were released on the 9th of September 2003, having a faster runtime performance of up to about eight times, with the improved compiler. They can also extend the functionality of Flash by giving you a trouble-free strategy to improve and enhance your Flash websites by adding features with no or little coding. They are installed in the Macromedia Flash authoring environment.
Menus
Under the Menus of the flash media components, you could purchase the 3DMenu, bounceMenu, dropMenu, iconbarMenu, scrollMenu, slideMenu, textMenu, and zoomMenu. The 3DMenu enables you to create state-of-the-art three-dimensional ingenious navigation systems or menus with mouse interactivity in Adobe Flash.
With the bounceMenu, you could produce both horizontal and vertical menus and fully customize Flash menu with custom cursors and a bounce effect. While the dropMenu enables you to add horizontal and vertical two-level menus to your Flash website which works with Extensible Markup Language.
The iconbarMenu is pretty similar to the Mac OSX icon bar which is a docked icon menu system that moves and magnifies with mouse interaction. Purchase the scrollMenu to define menu items dynamically through ActionScript or in the component panel and add scrollable dropdown menus to your Flash websites without coding.
Charts
Most of the time, you need to use charts to effectively and efficiently display data and information to your customers and flash extensions can enable you exactly that. With the charts components, you could create excellent three-dimensional pie charts, bar charts, line charts, pie charts, and stacked percent charts.
Navigation
Components Flash also includes navigation components such as the 360PanViewer, 360PanViewerPro, advancedTree, blogScroller, flashTicker, flashTickerFX, flashTooltip, flipNavigation, pageFlipper, photoFlow, thumbNailer, thumbNailerPro, and the ultimateScroller.
Other Components
Various components for Flash include the advacedLoader, advancedLoaderPro, bannerRotator, Bit Component Set, designersPoll, dndlist, ezFormPro, flashControllers, flashTimer, imageLoader, mdiContainer, multicolumnTextfield, randomLines, rssReader, speedController, styleManager, textExtend, uniLoader, and xmlCalendar.
Sound And Video
Flash extensions also include the flvPlayerPRO, hotFlashVideo, and the soundPlayerPRO that all enhance the audios and videos that your clients would hear and watch.
Without embedding a heavy .flv into your SWF file, the hot FlashVideo allows you to easily add interactive hotspots to your Flash Video. Thus, you could take advantage of the FLV format’s streaming capabilities since you can convert videon to flash easily with video to flash encoders which can be easily found. While the soundPlayerPRO lets you play your sound files from a playlist.
CMS
To enhance the content of your website, make sure to purchase one or all of the fCMS, fCMSPro, and the flashTexteditorSuite components for Flash.

There are a lot of people who want to Convert Video to Flash and put the Flash FLV videos on different types of media such as DVDs and portable devices, but they run into the YouTube flash problem when they try to do that. What is the YouTube flash problem? Well when you use a YouTube downloader to download YouTube videos from the website, you are downloading the FLV flash file. What is wrong with that?

Well FLV files are not friendly when it comes to anything other than playing the FLV flash file in a flash player. That creates the YouTube flash problem. That means that you will have to find a program that will convert the flash file into a different format, so you can do more with the FLV flash file. If you convert the flash file to WMV you will be able to burn the YouTube videos onto a DVD or VCD. That will allow you to use that DVD or VCD in any modern DVD player. That is not the entirety YouTube flash problem. Not all formats can do everything that you want to do, so converting it to a format will not completely erase the YouTube flash problem.

Depending on what you want to do you will have to convert the YouTube video file accordingly. If you want to play the file on an IPod then you would have to convert the YouTube file into a MP4 file. That is because MP4 files are the type of files that IPod media players use. If you want to play it on the new Blackberry then you would have to convert the FLV flash file into an AVI file. That will allow the YouTube video to be properly played on a touch screen Blackberry.

So in reality, converting the files of YouTube videos is not really getting rid of the YouTube flash problem. Converting the videos is pretty much a way to get around the YouTube flash problem. Fortunately, it works pretty well if you know how to get the programs that will do all of the converting for you. If you do not, it is as easy as searching on any major search engine. If you want AVI files then search for the term FLV to AVI. If you want MP4 then search for the term FLV to MP4. You will almost always get the best program to get around the YouTube flash problem.