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FLASH CONTENT
By now almost everyone is familiar with Flash - Used well, Flash can enhance the experience for your visitors and bring emotion, feeling and character to an otherwise lifeless page. Used badly, Flash can slow down, frustrate and drive them away.

The advantages of well made Flash stretch way beyond the cosmetic. Flash can be used to overcome the limitations of standard HTML and actually provide a more user friendly experience than otherwise possible. It can also be fully integrated with database data, making flash based pages equally as capable of displaying dynamic content. (see 'Dynamic Content' for more on this).

The advantages and uses of Flash are way too endless to try and list here - basically anything you can think of is possible...

Flash Player Statistics
Flash content requires a plug-in installed in the visitors browser in order for them to be able to see it. If you are worried that people won't be able to see your content because they won't have the correct browser plug-in have a look at the following statistics from an NPD Online Worldwide Survey on the Macromedia site:

Web Surfers with Flash Player 5 installed as at September 2002 : 92.12%

The recently released Flash Player 6 has many promising new features for extending the abilities of Flash pages and as at September 2002 usage was 58% and growing (up 24% from previous month)


	Eye Candy - If a picture paints a thousand words how many does a Flash animation paint ? A simple animation such as this creates an instant and distinct feel and is only 5K in file size (a smaller file size than the 'hands' picture on the Standard Content page).

	<	Streaming Audio Windows Media, Real Player, and Quicktime are great for streaming sounds but you are always stuck with their players which almost definitely bear no resemblance to the design of your site. With Flash streaming everything (the player, the controls, and placement on the page) is completely designed from scratch, allowing it to be fully integrated with the design of your site. The quality of the audio can also be customised for different modem speeds. This is an audio player I designed for the now archived Arcade site. Press 'Start' to test Flash streaming for a modem connection.
		Digital Video & Flash The latest version of the Flash Player (6) contains support for the use of digital video, both for streaming and for straight content (like the video on the right). As with audio streaming you are free to customise as much as you want. While this has the strongest implications for broadband web surfers it can still be used to produce some interesting effects that even us mere modem mortals can enjoy. The video on the right is 31K in size (Translation: About 5 seconds loading time on a 56K modem)	>

More Flash Content coming soon including 3D Flash (and possibly your only ever chance to blow up a teapot), Dynamic Flash, Flash forms, Navigation and more...

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