Because appearances are very powerful the look and feel of your website can say volumes about your business.
So whether you are a serious e-commerce website wanting to say that you mean business,
or whether you just want to liven up your personal website, animation can either
enhance or detract from your message.
Even the use of multi-colored navigation
bars can have a negative effect on the viewer or having an overdose of flashing
images, when there is too many animated or multi-colored items on a site, then the
message becomes obscured. And sometimes more isn't better, it's just more.
All that aside, there are several ways in
which to incorporate animation into your web pages, through the use of Java
applets, animated Gifs or animated Jpgs, whether you create these yourself or
borrow them from any number of countless websites giving out free or shareware
types of animated pictures. Gifs and Jpegs are the two most popular picture
formats on the web today and when made to be animated, there is a file that
contains a series of individual images that, when viewed in sequence, create the
illusion of movement. The Gif 89A format allows you to determine the delay
between individual frames of an animation (specified in 0.01-second increments).
The format is restricted to 256 colors and employs the older lzw compression
scheme. Download speed is determined by file size, and speed is important
because most visitors will only wait a relatively few seconds or up to a minute
for a website to load. After that the patience and attention span of the visitor
will be lost and they may look else where. So with the Gif 89A format you can
either slow down or speed up the frame series and possibly eliminate the number
of pictures actually used.
Programs like
Macromedia
Fireworks
and Alchemy Mindworks Gif Construction Set Professional also allow
you to create your own Gif based applets. Java Applets also look very impressive
but often require a browser that can handle Java (e.g.. Netscape), or plug-ins
such as Shockwave or Flash that are usually free of charge but can take awhile
to download.
Some links to provide access to some of these functions:
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Created By Wendy Slopsema