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Drew Homepage Flash

The Drew University homepage features a very simple Flash animation that I designed one week before launch to replace a scrapped interactive Javascript menu system.  The visual design with the blue bar was suggested by Ripple Effects Interactive, a consulting company involved with aiding the redesign.  However there was no recommendation for the number of slides, the content of the slides, or how they should behave.

When the web page loads, a javascript function checks to see if your browser supports a new enough version of flash.  If not, you get a JPEG version of the last slide.  If so, then the page loads a changer script.

The changer script loads an XML file that lists where the slides are located. The changer script then loads each one in order, allows the slide to play for about 10 seconds then fades to white and loads the next slide.  Not only does this allow us to swap slides in and out easily, but it also allows us to minimize initial load time.  At the very least, the user will get the slide changer loaded and a status bar for the first slide almost instantly.

To see this flash animation in motion, please visit http://www.drew.edu/.