[thelist] Flash/Liquid layouts etc

Erika Meyer emeyer at lclark.edu
Wed Feb 27 14:54:17 CST 2002


Re: Flash vs HTML personal experiences.

I just got done walking both sides of the fence (and ouch! good thing
I'm wearing Levis!  dang that barbed wire...)

http://www.lclark.edu/~art/

The art dept wanted to build a flash site.  Their way of doing so was
to have a the graphic design instructor gather content, and a design
student put the interface together.

Because accessibility & consistency are two goals in my office
(Public Affairs & Communications) I allowed them to build their Flash
site, but took the same content and dumped it into our homemade CMS,
Trillium.  I couldn't do all the pretty CSS stuff I usually like to
do because of the way the CMS is set up.  So the HTML version is very
vanilla.

It's interesting (or maybe not) to see the two different ways the
same info is presented.

There was no attempt to maintain a consistent look to the interfaces.
There was an attempt to maintain some consistency of information, but
that failed somewhat as the art student included information we'd
decided was better left to official sources (for example class
descriptions should be part of the catalog, not repeated on every
dept site) and also due to the different presentation environments.

The biggest difference *I* have noticed is the error correction and
maintenance aspects of the two sites.  A typo in the flash site means
that the graphic design teacher has to go to the original files (with
a student) find the text, edit it, and upload it again.  It takes
days or weeks for the process to to be completed... if it is
completed at all.

With Trillium, I (or anyone with the proper password) can click a
magic button on browser window, make the corrections right there on
the page, hit submit, and move on to something else.

Ease of maintenance is crucial in a decentralized environment like a
college.  & also accessibility must be a priority.

Erika
--

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Erika Meyer
Web Communications Consultant
Lewis & Clark College
Portland, Oregon USA
Phone: 503-768-7972
http://www.lclark.edu/~emeyer/
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