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.

What should an intro do?

All right, if we are going to build a real site intro what should we do and not do? Here's a list:

1. Life is short: intros should be too.
   Don't waste other people's lives by making them wait for site intros to download.
2. Start showing real content as soon as possible.
   Don't download video, large audio or images first: animate in some text or vector art first (possibly accompanied by small sounds) while downloading larger media. Preloaders are not counted as real content.
3. Entertain with what you have.
   A good entertainer can amuse audiences with a simple coin, spinning it across fingers or pulling it from unsuspecting kids' ears. Similarly, we may build animations from available resources while we wait for the next piece of media to arrive.
4. Reuse resources.
   If we are going to make people wait for our intro, we should try to use some of those elements (vector art, bitmap images, or sounds) within the site proper, so that those resources won't have to be downloaded again.
5. Give people an out.
   Do provide a "skip intro" button for visitors that have seen the intro before.

Points one through three will be obvious to many readers, but points four and five may be new ground. Sharing resources is a great way to download once and reuse over and over again. This is more fully discussed in our "Yet Another Flash MX Loader" tutorial elsewhere on this site, but here's a quick primer.

Any resource in your library may be shared with other Flash MX files. Shared resources do not have to be downloaded more than once, no matter how many SWF files you include them in. This makes sharing perfect for interface sounds, logos, and style elements that are repeated across multiple SWF files.

Open your Library (F11). Right click on a resource and choose Linkage? from the context menu. This will open the Linkage Properties dialog box.

This dialog lets you define how you want a resource to be shared. In a site intro, never "Export in first frame". This will force the resource to be loaded before any animation starts, negating the cool streaming of content that Flash MX does so well and instead leaving visitors with plenty of nothing to look at until the loading has completed.

The "Yet Another Flash MX Loader" tutorial discusses how to use these resources in other Flash movies. Also check out "Using Flash > Using Symbols, Instances, and Library Assets > Using shared library assets" in your help file for more info.

If you are going to spend time downloading resources, you may as well put the elements into a site intro and do some funky moves while you are waiting. Try to load the smallest elements first then do cool stuff with them while you load the larger resources.

Not sure about the sizes of your resources? Use your Bandwidth Profiler. See "Using Flash > Testing a movie > Testing movie download performance" in your help file for more info.

And because you have shared the resources, your intro will not be wasting anybody's precious seconds on this planet!

Time to look at some ActionScript coding ?cos we still have to add in a clever "skip intro" button.