Simple Viewer - Free Flash Photo Display Template - Slick Display

Nowadays, there are a million and one ways to display an image gallery on a web page. In many cases, I am a fan of the flash-based Simple Viewer from Airtight Interactive, which doesn't require flash knowledge to use.

It is a great for displaying large set of images or photo galleries that you would like to present in a nice, clean and slick fashion.

You can also prevent visitors from downloading your images by having them embedded in a flash file. Conversely, you also have the option to allow visitors to download your images, even though they are embedded in a flash file.

With the provided XML document, you can choose the background color & frame color of the gallery, position the thumbnail grid on any of the sides of the enlarged photos, and choose the number of rows/columns in the thumbnail grid. You can also integrate background images into the gallery.

A basic implementation of simple viewer can be found at the Shambala Sound Past Events Flyers. The XML document also allows you to declare a maximum width and/or height for the gallery, and apart from these contraints the gallery will expand to fit the entire window as you resize it.

Simpleviewer can also be integrated into a webpage, making it even more attractive in my opinion. Drawbacks here include the limitation on height or width depending on your design and your ability to manipulate the documents, as well as the location of the documents with the gallery and image references it relative to the location of the rest of the documents on the site.

An example of a design integration can be found at the Cutting Loose Salon Photoshoot Page as well as the DJ Shambala Photo Gallery.

Tips:

• Trial and error is a must when tweaking this setup - Airtight Interactive also has forums with loads of interest and support.
  
• Because of the way the images directories are referenced in the XML document, you will have to change the filepaths if you to view them on your machine versus on your website
• When making changes to the XML document, you will need to load the file path to the gallery.xml file and refresh that before seeing the changes on the web page that contains the flash document.
  

Nice Free Customizable MP3 Player fo Embedding on a Web Site

Over the years I have experimented with various flash-based mp3 players - something that can be customized to a fault that will display a playlist, allow them to play the tracks, pause, adjust volume, etc.

The latest generation I am using comes from flash-mp3-player.net, and contains many display varieties, from simple, small one-button setups to full playlist and controls. The customization options are designated either in the flash embed code or in an external xml document. The website provides many customization settings, as well as html documents contained within the templates that you download.

The only funny thing is the html documents mentioned above, which also contained sample embed codes based on various customizations, is labeled in french. While I have the advantage of studying french those high-school and college-years ago, I really don't need because it is pretty obvious from looking at the embed code what the custimizations do. If you are still confused, a jaunt to Babelfish should do the trick.

My most recent implementation of this player was at DJ Shambala's Mix Set Page, and DJ Shambala's Original Tracks page.

Why Flash is bad for Search Engine Traffic

Everybody loves Flash right? Not necessarily. As a web developer, I know that it can look cheesy if done wrong, it cannot display correctly or at all depending on the computer/pda/browser that is viewing it, and most importantly - it is not good for search engine traffic.

However, many of my clients are still a fan of Flash navigation and entire websites in Flash. While this can look fancy and grab viewers attention, it isn't worth a whole lot if people aren't finding your site. Hence I always suggest an HTML-only version if a Flash site is going to be made, and heres why:

Besides Page Titles & Meta Tags, Google, et al rely on page content to feed information about your site to the search engines, including:

1. Information contained in hyper text (words on the page as opposed to words in images),
2. Images/Photos/Graphics embedded on the web page (gifs, jpegs, pngs)
3. Images or text that are linking to another site

All 3 of these are elemental in bringing search traffic, in particular links to external websites, which is a major factor of your Page Rank: your position in a Google result for any particular search term.

When something is contained in a flash file, the search engines only register the flash file as an object, and any of the text, images and links contained within are irrelevant and unknown to the search engines.

Moreover, when an entire site and navigation is contained within a flash file, the website lacks an accumulation of html or html-like pages that help provide the various page titles, keywords, content, images and links that are necessary for building up your page rank and search engine traffic.

If an entire website is contained withing one flash file, the search engines only see one web page, when in actuality you may have 10 different pages of information to navigate. If these 10 pages are disbursed among 10 html pages, with varying page titles and keywords along with the content, then you have at least 10 times the amount of exposure for Google to find you.

Navigating the sea of AJAX Accordion Menu Effects & Their Free Templates

I don't code Javascript, etc from scratch, but I am fan of any template, widget, tutorial etc that I can find that enables me to display things like I want. Recently, a web site client described a desired menu-effect that ended up being the 'accordian' style AJAX menu effect - where sections expand and collapse in a smooth, flash-like fashion, without the flash.

While scouring the net for a suitable template for a particular AJAX menu effect that was desired by a client, I discovered that AJAX accordian templates were plentiful, but a crucial requirement was eluding me - the ability to expand the panels when hovering, not clicking.

I finally found this Accordion Menu Script collection at Dynamic Drive. In particular, the Apple style Accordion Menu, which offers the effect upon hover, and also gives you the choice to click or hover in order to trigger the expand.

You can choose if any of the panels are open by default when the menu loads. You can choose how quickly it expands, and as usual the effect delay time after hovering (in milliseconds). The CSS for the display and rollover effects are simple to manipulate and use background images, just don't forget to check everything in Internet Explorer vs non-IE.

I implemented a version of this menu for the Resources page of GPS Elder Care / Grossman Wernicke Inc, a Guardianship & Case Management service in Sarasota Florida.