I just finished up a new site for the Los Angeles lifestyle magazine ‘Angeleno’, working with talented guys at Faction7. I did the Flash front-end for the Features and Scene sections.
The idea was to create a ‘HTML style’ site with simple navigation and a focus on the content. This gives a familiar + intuitive user experience while still allowing some nice Flash flourishes. To allow deep linking and back button support we used SWFAddress. SWFaddress has the benefit of working with Google Analytics, to provide per-page tracking. One issue I found with SWFAddress is that it seems to give a noticeable lag when navigating between pages on Vista/IE7.
The features section includes a full-screen option which really shows off the large format photography. The scene section also includes a user-submitted commenting system which is quite cool (registration required). All content is completely dynamic, powered by a custom PHP CMS. The Flash XML content is written into the HTML pages, to allow for SEO.
One snag we hit was integrating DoubleClick ads. Since DoubleClick still does not support AS3 (!), we had to do some CSS/JS hacking to overlay ads in a HTML div. Hopefully DoubleClick will get this working soon.
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It looks fantastic – well done!
I just noticed a couple of minor issues in the featured area:
When I click near the bottom of any of the “view full screen” links, “view full screen” is highlighted but the story opens in the page. To view it full screen I have to move the mouse up a bit.
I liked being able to navigate with the keyboard when viewing in page, but it doesn’t seem to work in full-screen view.
I realised after that I just needed to click the mouse to move to the right, but the keyboard arrows were the first thing I tried and it felt good when it worked.
cheers! dAN
This gallery is nice. Well done!
dAN: – thanks for the feedback. I fixed the ‘view full screen’ button. Regarding keyboard input in fullscreen mode – this is disabled by the Flash player as a security measure. The Flash 10 player will allow fullscreen key input for non-printing characters (e.g. cursor keys, space bar)
This is the best flash site that I have seen. I will do whatever it takes to get you to work on my pet project (a site to showcase African fashion) one day. I will get in touch when I raise funds enough to catch your attention. 🙂
Keep up the good job.
Gorgeous site…it’s fun to keep track of the projects you’re working on. My favorite part of being a designer is being inspired by others’ work…thanks for sharing.
Hey, I made programmed a flash-based magazine site somewhat similar to this last year. It also uses SWFAddress and has a pretty sweet CMS: http://www.inqmnd.ca/site
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