Behind the scenes at Vivid Image

WD: Traditionally, Flash is not a search engine-friendly technology. How did Vivid Image go about making the site more visible to Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc?
DK: We used a combination of JavaScript, PHP, The Joomla! CMS, ActionScript 2 and HTML to embed HTML content onto the page with the Flash website so Google could navigate and spider the site. We have already had great success with this technique, and published a tutorial on how it works in the November edition of Web Designer. Grab a copy and check it out to learn how to do it yourself!

WD: Some web designers and developers view Flash as more of an animation tool than a true web design tool. What is Vivid Image’s take on the use of Flash in web design?
DK: Flash’s greatest feature used to be its timeline-orientated tweens, which certainly overlaps with the tweening methods used by animators. However, the big difference today is that ActionScript has now been developed to encompass a full-power, object-orientated language. AS2 has been replaced by a really impressive AS3. The improvements mean that AS can now compete with Flash, enabling creative coders to create more sophisticated applications that run faster than they used to.
Adobe’s product is more than ideal for web design. It combines the power of object-orientated structure and Flash’s ability to bring various media together and publish them in a format that is viewable on 98 per cent of the internet-connected machines, independent of the installed Operating System and browser type makes. With some coding skills and a bit of abstract thinking, this software really becomes a handy tool to create the best environment for representing content. Flash is criticised for the fact that its content is not fully search-friendly. But this is no longer the case. Adobe has been working with both Google and Yahoo! to make Flash content search-friendly without having to modify the already-published sites. The Vauxhall Collective site is a case in point of Flash being made searchable. I honestly believe that Flash can be brought to the level that HTML search ability is today.

WD: Testing is an essential part of the development process. What does the testing process at Vivid Image involve? How does it differ from site to site?
DK: For most projects, we like to have at least a month to test. But with this project we didn’t have a lot of time to test, since the whole thing had to be created in six weeks. In this case, we did guerrilla testing. One of the hard parts of this industry is that testing is always dictated by the budget. With most of the sites that we’ve been building, we carry out A/B testing. In other words, this is creating two versions of the same site and testing it with members of the public to see which one people respond to better, what works and what doesn’t.
For our eCommerce projects, Vivid Image really strives to make the shopping experience as fluid as possible for the user. On the development side, this entails comprehensive testing (or breaking) to make sure that nothing goes wrong during the checkout process, as this is the most critical area where most websites lose their customers.
Programs like Silverback are worth their weight in gold for tracking user movements around websites. Video tracking comes in really handy for content-intensive sites, when you want to see exactly how the user accesses information, and what areas on the website attract the most, or least, attention. We also prefer to carry out a range of smaller tests, covering various aspects of the site, rather than trying to cram everything we want tested into one scenario. We have found that coming up with specific scenarios, or personas, tends to deliver more effective data than just letting the tester run wild, while trying to observe everything they are doing and all the usability issues they might bring to light. Although we don’t have a dedicated usability team in place, this is something that we’ll be building on in the future.

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