You know all of those cool websites with animated banners and graphics, and interactive features? The websites you stay on for a while, checking things out, and actually finding out a lot about that company? Don’t you wish that could be your website? It can. All that animation and interaction is done with a program called Adobe Flash. You’ve probably heard of it, like when you go to some websites and a message pops up informing you need such and such version of Flash to view this website, would you like to install it? Well, whether you wanted to install it or not, you might want to think about learning it. Steven Patterson, owner of The ACTS Learning Center in Florence, Kentucky, explains why.
Adobe Flash is the quintessential program for animated and interactive features in web design. It does more than create those annoying flashing ads that barrage some web pages you view. Flash is the way to create anything, well, moving that you see online. You can stream audio and video with Flash. You can keep the text about your company moving up the homepage with Flash. You can create a page where your web site visitors can answer questions with Flash. It is an important presentation, communication, and marketing tool in today’s business world. Flash not only makes your website more attractive, it shows that you are up-to-date on today’s technology and internet trends.
The first step to learning Adobe Flash is learning its “language,” ActionScript. A class will start you off with this method, where you learn how to give the program commands. Different symbols and words tell the program to animate this, increase the size of that, and insert video here. The ActionScript is the most important part of Flash use to learn. The language will begin to make sense when you start using multiple commands to create one overall page or image.
The next step is actually applying this language and learning all the capabilities of Flash. You can learn how to animate text, graphics, and photographs, how to create interactive applications, how to insert sound and video, how to work different elements together in one web page, and even how to create games.
Finally, there’s the editing and formatting. When you create one of these elements, say animation, for example, there is a lot more flexibility in editing when you use the ActionScript programming language rather than simply animating directly on an animation program. Now that you know the commands, you can simply go in and alter them to get a different effect. You are sort of editing from behind the scenes, and it makes things a lot easier. Newer versions of Flash include newer versions of ActionScript, which is not to say that the language itself has changed, but the capabilities of the language, instead. These changes make mastering the language and applying it easier, like a feature to save and reuse codes so it becomes like a quick command on your toolbar. You will also learn how to take your projects and import and export them to different documents, presentations, and web pages.
Adobe Flash is a bit more complicated and technical than your average office program, thanks largely in part to ActionScript. However, with the focused intensive attention of a class, you can master it – or, at least, learn it well. This program is obviously the most worthwhile to learn for illustrators, designers, web designers, and web hosts. But it can also be extremely helpful to know for anyone who is in the position of needing marketing or improved web activity for their business on a low budget.
