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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Joomla or Flash based WEB Site??!!??

Personally I think that most "flash websites" are complete and utter shit. They take forever to load, and are not "usable". Even if they look cool.

If your looking for a "website" where someone can design and build something for you, and you can maintain by adding fresh content I would recommend drupal.
 
I'd avoid Flash for anything that's not a spot animation, banner ad or a video. If you make your entire site Flash, search engines won't be able to see any of your content= really bad for SEO.

Personally I'm a huge fan of Wordpress-based websites. You have a boatload of nice templates to start from and it's simple to setup and customize.

I used to hire web designers to do all the heavy lifting but I've been using Wordpress for both my standard blogs like this one:

http://www.twenty398.com/

and portfolio type sites like:

http://www.writenoise.net/

Some great WP templates here: http://www.elegantthemes.com/ and here: http://themeforest.net/

I also use Shopify for my e-commerce sites like Call Box:

http://www.callboxlive.com/

And I also like Squarespace which I use for this site:

http://www.dslr-cinematography.com/

I do hear good things about Joomla and Drupal there a decent number of templates are out there. And as I alluded to above, Flash is ok for showing quick pieces of animation or video (though embedded YouTube is actually better because folks will find your site through Youtube as well).

So I guess it really all comes down to what's more important to you. If you don't care about folks finding your site organically through search engines and just want a dynamic visual presentation- then sure go with Flash. But if you want something more customizable and search engine friendly- go with one of these other tools.
Noah
 
Forget Flash, its blind to SEO, won't appear at all on iPad or iPhone. Your web visitors will most likely view your site on a mobile device. Make it easy for them. I have galleries on my site that are powered by HTML. Don't go nuts with the interactivity, on a mobile device it gets frustrating for the visitor to navigate through. But definitely avoid Flash. The only people that benefit from a Flash website is Adobe.
 
I have been knee deep in Joomla for a few years now and I enjoy the platform. There are some great modules and plug ins available and you can customize it very easily. Unless your a flash wiz, they can be a pain in the ass to edit on the fly. I have used several flash sites in the past but quickly migrated to the Joomla/mambo platforms.

Keep in mind that there are also some powerful plugins for WordPress these days, this site I am building currently is done solely on W.P

http://taranakihardcore.com/

as well as my Film Project site:

http://thetollhouse.net also in W.P

I built this site on Joomla with the ZenCart Module

http://www.globalblackops.com/us2nz/


I think it really depends on the content and function of your site. If your looking for something that you can quickly add content to and update immediately, then Joomla is the one for you as it has live edit on articles etc and is very flexible.

Hope this helps, good luck with your site!
 
Hey Ketch,

Joomla is a great content management system, I find that it can easily be customized to meet various needs. I've used it on multiple websites.

Something you might want to look into is Squarespace. - I see Mark beat me to it.
 
Hi KETCH:

• PHP5 (OOP-Style)
• MySQL
• AJAX
• CSS
• JQUERY
• FLASH (Where appropriate)

Flash is not dead. Adobe is a very powerful company. Look at Zynga! Use Flash where it makes sense but not for the entire site. Our i4vegas.com, i4hawaii.com and i4newyork.com sites are IMHO excellent examples of attractive PHP/MySQL sites that make appropriate use of Interactive Flash (maps), Flash Video, AJAX, CSS and JQUERY while maintaining SEO best practices. It's pretty easy to make sure all of your Flash elements have alternate JPG or GIF images for example on iPhones.

I've spent nearly 11 years working towards the optimal combination of web technologies for our sites. Knowing you Ketch, you'll be much happier long-term with your own proprietary solution than with an off-the-shelf or monthly subscription-hosted solution. You're gonna want to do this thing or that thing and most of those offerings fall short somewhere or another. With that said, make sure the developer you hire knows how to write PHP5 code using strict OOP best-practices and that they are very experienced with JQUERY, AJAX, CSS and MySQL. Also, make sure you let YouTube or Vimeo host and serve your video content and just frame it up within a flash or similar player on your site.

If budget is a bigger concern than long-term flexibility and functionality, then look into open-source or hosted solutions that use the technologies I've listed. There are many. You don't necessarily have to build everything yourself. Good thing about the open-source solutions is that a developer can get you up to speed quickly but then add whatever you want customized later. OSCommerce and Magento are two examples.

Oh, and take a look at monstertemplates.com for some excellent design templates to get you going. Design is half the battle.

-michael zaletel
 
michael zaletel said:
Flash is not dead.
Click to expand...

Is a true statement, but as far as I am concerned, the return in value for working with it is just not worth it for most websites. For people with less than stellar internet connections, it can be slow if you have a lot of content. FLASH is with no doubt a resource hog, but for the things it does, currently there is no other solution. HTML5 is NOT supported on all platforms.

In addition, given the number of people who use NON flash internet devices and phones, putting too much in FLASH could turn people off of your site.

In all the websites I have worked with, what I found is that I wanted as much simplicity as possible. This was to make me update more often and make it easier.

I settled on Wordpress. It was easy to customize (and I can code PHP) and it allows you to have a blog AND add additional pages. I have not looked at all the features you want, but I LOVE how I can upload images, video and audio right into the post while I am doing it.

This is my site:

www.asylumstudioproductions.com

It's a custom theme I started with another theme and built.
 
I wouldn't bet against Adobe. I am probably Apple and Steve Job's biggest fan but we are talking about the company that owns Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects, Dreamweaver and Acrobat. People were putting nails in Pagemaker's coffin when Adobe surprised the world with InDesign and took the reins back from Quark.

I'll give Mr. Jobs one thing, he really knows how to pick his battles. He really had no choice though, the Flash CS5 cross-platform iPhone/Android Dev. environment would have jeopardized everything Apple has worked so hard to build surrounding the App Store. Building an iPhone App in Objective-C and Cocoa with X-Code is not exactly a simple task compared to the elegant workaround Adobe had devised for it's massive developer base already trained to use it's tools. They have good reason to be upset but business is business and they really shouldn't have expected any less from Apple. In Apple's defense, that nested code would have had performance problems no doubt but don't assume Apple didn't have other motives. However, Flash is ubiquitous. It's the single-most universal plug-in worldwide. People have just never really understand how and where to use it and Adobe has made the repeated mistake of presenting it as an end-all solution.

If people were thinking through their workflow, they'll build all their UI and Designs in Adobe Illustrator in layers, using editable-spot-colors and nested editable symbols. Then they could import that flawlessly into either Flash or into Photoshop for dicing and slicing for all other UI requirements including iPhone dev. With the added bonus that all scalable vector graphics can be easily edited and color adjusted and imported with layers into After Effects or Motion. :)

-michael zaletel
 
WOW, love the responses, Thanks guys.

Mark, love squarespace, and heard great things about it, so definitely looking in to it.

Joomla is a platform that I have been looking in to it for a while and Flash is just , well flashy, so for that I like it, but obviously speed, viewer enjoyment comes first, so I had looked in to the Dominion template of Joomla, this one: http://demo.rockettheme.com/?template=dominion what do you think?

As far as Flash I had been looking in Templates such as this: http://www.myflashxml.com/Content-management-system-flash-template.asp

and this ones: http://www.bluegelmedia.com/website-templates/flash-cms-templates-type/28533.html

But before I go deep and lunch my sites I wanted to get your opinions and make sure that I don't just make a decision based on what I like or what a certain web designer wants to sale.

I appreciate the links provided and will visit each one of them.

Look forward in continuing the reading in the progress of this thread.
 
Okay,

*Noah V. I agree, most Flash sites are in deed too slow, but some of them are just beautiful and I like the Dynamic presentations.

*Mark P. I'm trying to understand if squarespace is similar or different then Joomla type sites.

*Noah K. Yes I do like some flash, but again if it can be achieved avoiding the what seems to be problems then I will, thanks for the links, I like them but a bit different for the look and fill of what I'm looking to do.

*Jeff, definitely a nono as I surely want both iPhone and especially iPad to be able to search my sites at large, especially so iPad, as I have something specially planned App wise for it, thanks for the heads up!

*John I also like Joomla, and i like http://thetollhouse.net great clean fill, and I'm continuing to look at Jommla, even so some time it overwhelms me, and I'm getting tired of web designers that don't respond, fort this I look to something that I can manage, at list till I can put a great budget towards.

*Chris, thanks, great to know that you fill that way about Joomla, and also as both of you and Mark suggested I'm looking in to squarespace.

*Justin I do love what you have done with http://royalgalacticmedia.com very similar to what I'm looking to do with my sites, a Super Blogger, with great images and videos, with a very clean and easy to serf platform, just have no idea how different is Word Press form Joomla, and if it offers the same type CMS, and it is simple to manage and create that particular site you have created, not really willing to go in to XHTML coding etc, too much to study already now that I'm also getting in to Editing.

*He he, Michael you do seem to know me well, I do have desires and need to change things at will, but unfortunately I also need to start at once, and for this I'm looking to a Template that I can basically mold at my pleasure to start with, and then do what ever is needed o upgrade the sites when the Budget is there to hire the best, as I see that other wise I just never lunch the sites.

*Unfortunately Rick I can't write codes of any kind, just few very basic ones, he he, so I need to find a solution that offers some kinda of Admin panel.


Again thanks so much guys for participating.
 
Ketch,

Woah! Sorry if I implied that Wordpress needed coding, it doesn't! I use the admin panel in it too! I just hacked around as well :)
 
For me it was pure laziness AFTER the site was done. I like to add categories for each project I am on and it is SO easy, it's awesome.

There appears to be gallery features and such, I just haven't hit that yet.

BUT, if you want to see a site I am still working on that is some CRAZINESS, check out this:

http://www.welcometorelativity.com

This IS all coding that I put together from an opensource project to make the website for the film I have in preproduction be like a text adventure. As I said, it is not done yet, but it has been A LOT of fun! It's ALL written in Javascript.
 
You can add another vote for Wordpress from me. Squarespace looks interesting though.

If you're into coding yourself, CodeIgniter is a pretty good PHP framework that makes writing web apps way easier than in just straight PHP.


michael zaletel said:
I'll give Mr. Jobs one thing, he really knows how to pick his battles. He really had no choice though, the Flash CS5 cross-platform iPhone/Android Dev. environment would have jeopardized everything Apple has worked so hard to build surrounding the App Store. Building an iPhone App in Objective-C and Cocoa with X-Code is not exactly a simple task compared to the elegant workaround Adobe had devised for it's massive developer base already trained to use it's tools. They have good reason to be upset but business is business and they really shouldn't have expected any less from Apple. In Apple's defense, that nested code would have had performance problems no doubt but don't assume Apple didn't have other motives. However, Flash is ubiquitous. It's the single-most universal plug-in worldwide. People have just never really understand how and where to use it and Adobe has made the repeated mistake of presenting it as an end-all solution.
Click to expand...

I don't want to derail this thread, but... There's a very good reason Apple doesn't want other development environments that can make application for its iPhone and iPad application stores, and it's not about performance (but performance would be worse in Flash apps, yes).

The reason Apple is making everyone use C, C++ or Objective C is because their tools compile it. Why? Think back to 2004, when Mac OS X only ran on PowerPC. Apple had had its Xcode tools out for a year, but almost all developers used Metrowerks CodeWarrier to build and compile their applications. Apple recommended that developers switch to Xcode then, because two years later they moved to Intel, and most of the developers who had switched to Xcode could click one checkbox, and their application would work on Intel Macs natively (although some minor code changes would have been required for others). But those still using CodeWarrior couldn't at all. Codewarrior only supported PowerPC and it ended up being discontinued.

Adobe and Microsoft didn't start moving their code into Xcode until after Apple had moved to Intel. The result? Adobe and Microsoft's users had to run Creative Suite and Office in the slow, emulated Rosetta layer. Adobe didn't release native versions until a year and a half later, and Microsoft didn't release an Intel version of Office until 2008! This is exactly what Apple wants to avoid with the iPhone. There's no telling whether ARM chips will be the best mobile processors in the future. It may be that they instead switch to a Power or x86 based processor. If a significant proportion of the apps on the app store used Flash, then it could take months and months for Adobe to make their Flash cross compiler target the new architecture, and then test, distribute, have developers recompile, test and then send their new apps back to the app store. Thousands of apps just wouldn't work at all... But those who use C, C++ and Objective-C in Xcode would have the new tools in the beta period, and could easily have their apps upgraded before the new phone shipped...

So being able to move their iPhone and iPad products to a different processor platform is probably the main reason Apple doesn't want flash apps for its platform. The other is if they switch to 64 bit. Again, it could take a long time for Adobe to get their compiler working with 64 bit, but not long at all for regular developers.

And then there's the idea of Flash in the web browser - but the simple fact is that Adobe hasn't actually released a full version of Flash for mobile platforms... They have a beta for Android, but it requires the most powerful mobiles (only Arm Cortex A8 and A9 processors) and apparently there's a lot of content it still can't handle. In the web browser, it's just far more efficient to use H.264 for video directly embedded in the HTML code (with HTML5), and games work a lot better as native applications (since almost all flash games are written to be played with a mouse and keyboard).
 
I don't think many people realize how much resources Flash based code use. It amazes me on my Macbook Pro 2x2.93Ghz how a page with Flash can make my machine crawl in ANY of the web browsers I've used.

In my opinion, I do actually like a lot of Flash stuff, I just think it needs a MAJOR rewrite.

In other news, there is a rumor around the net today that Apple is attempting an $8B buyout of ARM. That is quite an interesting situation.

When people ask me about FLASH on their websites I ask them to think about how they like FLASH on websites. In some cases it makes a lot of sense. In others, it doesn't. But I like the mixture.

Also, scripting in your HTML files can in fact detect if you are on a platform that supports FLASH, so there is always the option of having both but have it auto detect. (And some sites just let you chose before you enter).

I will play devi's advocate with Apple though, if FLASH were enabled, people could write a lot of games in FLASH and not make all games in the app store so attractive. I'm sure this must have crossed their mind.

But, I've written in flash AND I have an App in the iPhone store (iExposure) and can say programming in their environment is SO EASY and well done. I applaud them for NOT USING JAVA! :)
 
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