Digital Workshop

I would like to include a small flash-based animation (no audio or video) on the home page of a web-site and am concerned about those viewers who do not have the Flash player installed - and where the browser will come up with the Flash installation routine. My questions are:

1. Will some users e.g. in corporations have trouble installing this?
2. Is there anyway of displaying e.g. a still image instead of the blank box if a viewer chooses not to install or can't install the the Flash player? If so, help in achieving this would be much appreciated.
3. Does anyone have a view of what percentage of viewers don't have the Flash player installed?

Thanks.

1 - Yes, we've found that some large corporations do not have flash installed, and will not allow it.

In those instances what we've learned is that:

- Although the "office" computers don't have flash, there's normally a multimedia pc in a boardroom or conference room that does have it

- Sometimes the user just has to approach their IT department and ask

- Worst case, most people have a pc at home... if they're interested, they'll look there.


2 - There are example scripts on the internet to help you do this. Start by searching the knowledge section of the Macromedia site. Sorry not to be more helpful here... we've tried all sorts of bits of script to get people to install flash, but, as multimedia/web developers we've decided that if they can't get flash, they don't want our services either!

3 - Macromedia's statistics say that "Macromedia Flash content reaches 97.7% of Internet viewers". See here : http://www.macromedia.com/software/play ... ashplayer/

Linda,

Very many thanks for your extremely helpful response.

Peter

What Linda said - plus, far as I know there's no way to display an image instead of the blank Flash box within a single webpage ...so you need a Flash detection routine on the first page viewers land on - then shepherd them off to 2 versions of the webpage in question: one using Flash; other using still images (or animated GIF).

Rob
www.visibleform.co.uk

You can do this by setting the background of the OBJECT tag to an image using CSS.