Flash CS4 scaling query

leanne

New Member
Hello!

With the help of this forum's members I've managed to create this website

leannemallinder.co.uk

It took a while but I figured out how to get the background images to scale and maintain quality. What I need to know now is how to stop the the links and description boxes from scaling automatically as well? On a normal sized screen they look ok but at work I have a 24" Imac and they look far too too big.

I hope you can help!

Leanne
 
Looking at the site, is there any particular reason to use Flash? CSS could do the same job. If you PM me one of the images then I'll do a quick CSS mockup, it would be more SEO and accessible as well.
 
Only because I've not done a lot of web design and I've only really used flash. I'd like to learn other ways but when I'm doing it on my own and learning as I go it would take far longer. As it's so nearly finished I'd like to stick with what I've done so far. I may try something different when I redesign it again.

Leanne
 
Another problem I am having it that it is not loading as quickly as I would like. The swf is quite large over 20MB. I've resaved all the images as very high rather than maximum in photoshop and I have compressed the jpgs in Flash. I'm not sure what I can do to reduce the file size even more without losing the image quality.

Any help would be great

Leanne
 
20mb!!?!?? that's massive! why is it so huge?

you need to load backgrounds or other images dynamically only when needed
 
It's all the images I'm using. I found some tips yesterday on how to reduce the file size like not using the imported jpeg data but that didn't make any difference. There was a tip on loading the images dynamically but I didn't have time to try it last night. I'll give that a go but I have a feeling it may take me a while to get it right.
 
Thanks for your advice. If I could afford to hire someone I probably would at this stage to finish it off. I'm doing it myself because I want to learn this skills but with limited time I can spend on my website, never being taught them and learning as I go it is more difficult and time consuming.
 
20mb or not, it loads instantly for me (no idea what my connections like - I'm at my brothers house and he has standard Sky internet). One thing I noticed was the type in the description box seemed to move up and down in different sections.

If you're running out of time on this how about cutting your losses and setting the site size so it would fit in a 1024x768 browser and then have it floating in the centre of the screen? This means you could reduce the size of the images and in turn reduce the size of the site. I know how it feels to get set on the idea of doing something, but sometimes you have to admit defeat! Of course once you do this you'll work out how to do it the way you want ;)
 
It's not painfully slow but for me at home and work I have a white screen for about four seconds before the background appears. And it does something weird where I have to click the links in order before I can click through them in any order. I'm putting this down to the loading time or possibly the links being a little close together.

Thanks for mentioning about the type they should be level but I will double check them tonight.
I'm not exactly running out of time with this although I am very keen to get it finished, it's just that I commute to work every day so don't have that much available time to spend on it, and when I'm learning as I go it's taking me a long time. I think I'm going to look into hiring someone to finish it, which hopefully won't be too expensive as most of it is there.
 
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