gmg tutorials - flash intro design

Flash MX Skip Intro

A discussion on Flash intro design and how we can make it right.

01 Introduction
02 Server logs / How may we avoid the intro? / Why would we want an intro?
03 What should an intro do?
04 A clever skip intro button
05 Automatic skip build / Conclusion / About the authors / Copyright

Previous << Introduction

Server logs

We have already seen some of the reasons why people tend to skip our intros. Don't believe me? Check out your server logs and see how many times your intro.swf file downloads completely, and compare that to the number of times you have incomplete transfers of intro.swf (or whatever your intro is called). And if they are skipping your intros, you are probably annoying your site visitors (or worse still: your client's visitors).

What? You don't have access to your client's server logs? Our advice is to sign whatever confidentiality agreements you have to to get access to this invaluable resource. It will help you to optimise the work you deliver. The logs will:

Enable you to see how visitors are using your sites.
Make sure that the marketing aims of the site are being met.
Let you fine tune the traffic flow through your site, supporting the business goals of your clients.
Establish popular resources within the site so you may develop more of that media or redevelop some of the weaker content of the site.
Know how visitors are finding your sites.
Find out who is linking to your sites.

Armed with this information, you are able to deliver premium content and advice for your clients (especially if you have a SEO clause in your contract). And in this case it may even let you know that you are annoying every new visitor to your site with an intro movie.

We have developed some custom Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and Access databases to make analysing server logs quick and easy. The Excel templates contain scripts to import and tidy up the raw log files which we then transfer to our Access databases. With each database we can write any custom queries we like to review the log files. This gives us (and our clients) an opportunity to ask any questions concerning what people are doing on our sites, where is our traffic coming from, what areas are the most popular, how effective a particular promotional campaign is, or anything else that interests us. The cost to us was that we had to learn Microsoft Office scripting, spreadsheet and relational database skills. It's really been worth the effort, though!

How may we avoid the intro?

Anyway, back to avoiding intros. You may find that most of the time, a good solution to the loader problem is to stream a stylish animation of your sites' GUI components (including logos). Build it fast (not too many frames) and lean (not too many bytes). It will impress site visitors with a "less is more" approach while actually providing a useful service: animating the construction during the file download phase. Magicians do this all the time. They wave one hand in the air saying "Look at me, look at me," while the other hand is busy supporting the illusion.

It must be quick, though, otherwise it will get tedious for the viewer to watch animations every time they go to your site. We will develop a piece of code for this later. It will detect if enough of the SWF file has loaded so that you may play an alternate animation, or simply jump to a fully constructed page.

The added bonus is that if the build animation is quick enough, when your visitors subsequently return, the GUI build (our non-intro) shouldn't have enough time to annoy anyone!

Why would we want an intro?

This is great for sites that want to get down to business as quickly as possible (keep it fast), have strong branding that is easily converted to vector art (keep it lean), and have a small set of resources that are required for the user interface (that is: a clean, minimal style).

But there are better ways to support sites that have a richer design style, large audio resources, or substantial quantities of bitmapped or vectored components.

You may also have clients that have special requirements for an intro. And it may have to tie in with cross media branding. A parallel to this is the "Station ID" used by TV or cable broadcasters. They are usually quick, punchy, let you know who's delivering the great media you are about to view, then they get out of your way.

Building a high quality site intro under these conditions will challenge anyone's Flash MX skills. It will have to start displaying the intro as quickly as possible (not just a loading message), buffer further intro content at appropriate places within the intro before displaying it, and allow viewers that have already seen the intro (or are not interested in it) to skip the intro.

Next >> What should an intro do?